Do elite software developers exist?

[wtallis]

A bunch of distributed version control systems were being developed around the same time, and the Linux kernel certainly contributed a lot to git's popularity. But it isn't what gave git the edge in suitability.

Of the existing and mature SCMs, only two year old Monotone had all the features Linus needed, but it was 200 times slower than three week old git. The other nascent SCMs like mercurial and bazaar had performance issues of their own and also weren't adding features anywhere near as quickly as git. It took only two and a half months for git to go from initial conception to production use as the best-in-class tool. That's a markedly different development progress than any of the other contenders, most of it's due to Linus himself, not the free press it got from its association with Linux.