I think that the commit history says a lot about the development process and the company culture. First, is that it's interesting to see how these companies work internally. Second, it's easier to dive into the code by reading the latest commits. You can see what's going on and what pieces are changed together. Finally, there is a substantial difference between:

- a repository that's handled as a first class "source code ledger" (pick one or several of: proper branching/merging, atomic commits, issues referenced in commit messages, etc).

- a repository full of "git commit -a -m 'ill fix this bug later, TGIF'" whose history makes no sense.

I don't want to open the debate on which one is preferable or not (most people agree that git bisect is handy, but it is open to debate whether it's worth the cost).

What I'm wondering is how it looked and why it was rewritten. The most probable reason is that they wanted to make sure that nothing sensitive was exposed (non-redistributable embedded dependencies, information on their infrastructure, ...). But it's also possible that this was started as a type-2 repository and they don't want to expose this image.

I tend to think that every code should be written (and developed) as it was open sourced one day, but as always there's a cost trade-off in here.

Anyway, thanks for open sourcing this piece of software!