Larry McVoy is the founder of BitMover and the creator of BitKeeper, a commercial distributed version control system. BitKeeper’s own project site, which McVoy’s company maintains, describes the tool as built for scalability and performance and now distributes it “as Open Source under the Apache 2.0 License.”
McVoy’s most consequential decision came in the early 2000s, when he made a free-of-charge edition of BitKeeper available to open source projects under a license that forbade users from working on competing tools. On that basis the Linux kernel project adopted BitKeeper in 2002, giving kernel developers a fast distributed workflow years before any free tool offered the same.
That arrangement ended in 2005. After a developer produced software that interoperated with BitKeeper repositories, BitMover stopped offering the free version, a move that prompted Linus Torvalds to write git. The episode is documented in firsthand kernel accounts of that spring.
McVoy open-sourced BitKeeper in 2016 under the Apache 2 license. He was candid about why, telling LWN that “Git/Github has all the market share. Trying to compete with that just proved to be too hard,” and that BitMover chose to release the code “while we still had money in the bank and see what happens.”