The reason Linus wrote Git was specifically because he was unwilling to accept the centralization of the existing popular source-control systems like CVS and SVN, and Linux's license to the unpopular proprietary decentralized source control system it was using got revoked because Larry McVoy threw a tantrum. Linus needed an open-source alternative, so he tried the unpopular open-source source-control systems like Monotone, but he felt they suffered from both featuritis and inadequate performance, so he wrote a "stupid content tracker" called Git.