BitKeeper is a software tool for distributed revision control (configuration management, SCM, etc.) of computer source code. A distributed system, BitKeeper competes largely against other systems such as Git and Mercurial. BitKeeper is produced by BitMover Inc., a privately held company based in Campbell, California and owned by CEO Larry McVoy, who had previously designed TeamWare.

BitKeeper builds upon many of the TeamWare concepts. Its key selling point is the fact that it is a distributed version control tool, as opposed to CVS or SVN. One of the defining characteristics of any distributed version control tool is the ease with which distributed development teams can keep their own local source repositories and still work with the central repository. Its web site claims that "BitKeeper has been shown to double the pace of software development".

BitKeeper uses history files that are based on the idea of the delta tables and interleaved deltas from SCCS but the BitKeeper history files are made intentionally incompatible by using a different magic number (0x01 0x48 instead of 0x01 0x68) at the beginning.^{[citation needed]}

Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell (born 28 February 1967) is an Australian computer programmer best known as the author of and contributor to the Samba file server, and co-inventor of the rsync algorithm.

He is known for his analysis of complex proprietary protocols and algorithms, to allow compatible free and open source software implementations.

Tridgell was a major developer of the Samba software, analysing the Server Message Block protocol used for workgroup and network file sharing by Microsoft Windows products. He developed the talloc hierarchical memory allocator, originally as part of Samba.

For his PhD thesis, he co-developed rsync, including the rsync algorithm, a highly efficient file transfer and synchronization tool. He also was the original author of rzip, which uses a similar algorithm to rsync.

He is the author of KnightCap, a reinforcement-learning based chess engine.

Tridgell was also a leader in hacking the TiVo to make it work in Australia, which uses the PAL video format.^{[citation needed]}

Linus Benedict Torvalds (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈliːn.ɵs ˈtuːr.valds] ( listen); born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish Americansoftware engineer and hacker, best known for having initiated the development of the open source Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator. He also created the revision control system Git. He was honored (shared with Dr Shinya Yamanaka) with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel".

Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland. He is the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (5.5% of Finland's population). Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although in the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Torvalds is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus the Peanuts cartoon character", noting that this makes him half "Nobel-prize-winning chemist" and half "blanket-carrying cartoon character".