Wasn't the final straw when Bitkeeper revoked usage for open source projects?
> Git development began in April 2005, after many developers of the Linux kernel gave up access to BitKeeper, a proprietary source-control management (SCM) system that they had formerly used to maintain the project. The copyright holder of BitKeeper, Larry McVoy, had withdrawn free use of the product after claiming that Andrew Tridgell had created SourcePuller by reverse engineering the BitKeeper protocols.
But as the BitKeeper article makes clear, the relationship between BitKeeper and OSS had been frosty for a while.
Larry McVoy comments here occasionally as https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=luckydude
People have noted multiple times that its current build system is fairly hostile to packaging on *NIX, but nobody seems to be putting in the work and the time. I'm somewhat curious about BitKeeper, but not enough to make my first goal to go down into its guts (complete with a custom stdio from NetBSD with modifications!) to make it play nicely with my system.
[1] https://users.bitkeeper.org/t/thoughts-after-a-few-days-with...