From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control, lived from inside
The article traces the evolution of version control systems from the 1990s to 2026, detailing the limitations of early tools like SCCS, RCS, and Visual SourceSafe, the rise and fall of CVS and Subversion, and how Git emerged in 2005 after BitKeeper revoked its free license for the Linux kernel. Git’s distributed model solved longstanding issues with centralization, offline work, and merge complexity, allowing it to dominate despite being written in just ten days. The author, a practitioner who used each major system, reflects on the human and technical costs of each era and why no successor to Git has gained traction. Git’s structural advantages and ecosystem, especially through GitHub, have cemented it as the default for modern software development.
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// contents The pre-VCS era, what we did before formal version control existed The lock-based era, SCCS and RCS CVS, concurrent edits, server-based, badly Visual SourceSafe, the parallel commercial track Subversion, "CVS done right" April 2005, the month version control changed forever GitHub, the platform that made Git the default Git in 2026, what won, what didn't, what's next The practitioner arc, what each system cost, what Git gave back Closing // reading 0% · ~10 min remaining 0x07│ 2026.04.28│ 10 min read │ git · version-control · source-control · cvs · subversion · sourcesafe · history · programming · dvcs · github · opinion │ history (v1) From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control, lived from inside In April 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote Git in ten days because…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at EvilGeniusLabs.ca.
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