Andrew Tridgell, widely known as “tridge,” is an Australian programmer best known for creating Samba, an SMB file and printer server for Unix, and rsync, a fast file transfer program whose core algorithm came out of his PhD thesis. His own page at samba.org lists both projects along with research interests in networking protocols and parallel systems.
In 2005 Tridgell worked on free software that could read data from BitKeeper repositories, a tool later known as SourcePuller. At his linux.conf.au keynote that April he demonstrated how he had approached BitKeeper’s network protocol. By his own account it was not sophisticated reverse engineering: he connected to a BitKeeper server with telnet, typed “help,” and discovered the commands he needed, including one to clone a repository.
LWN’s contemporaneous report quotes him directly making this point, that “getting a handle on the BitKeeper network protocol turned out to be rather easier” than wizardry suggests. During the talk the audience called out each command for him to run, replicating the process in about two minutes.
BitMover treated this interoperability work as a violation of BitKeeper’s free license and stopped offering the no-cost version to open source projects. That decision, rather than any single technical detail, is the documented hinge that led Linus Torvalds to write git.