keep in mind, tho, that teamware was decentralized version control in the 80s or very early 90s inside sun tho, so i don't think it's antithetical to something companies require
i've never used teamware and i don't have a good handle on how it worked
with respect to merkle trees, it's true that encryption was merkle's original intended use for them, but i don't know if anyone has ever used them for that except as an experiment. surely not since rsa was published
Maybe making the core data structure be a merkle tree (not a separate data structure for validation) was new... at least, for version control? It seems monotone used merkle trees as an overlay https://decomposition.al/blog/2019/05/31/how-i-learned-about...
I'm mainly going by larry, who told me that git's data structure wasn't from bitkeeper (but was "all his", IIRC). The significance is that this data structure can't model renames (of course, could do them as an overlay or decoration - though git doesn't)