When I say "truth" I have no idea what happened, but Larry just pulling the free version didn't quite seem to fit. There had always been tension but on the whole, there was a sort of equilibrium between the kenrel community and BitKeeper.
So I've been wondering what exactly prompted BitKeeper to pull their free version. It always seemed to be about the non-compete reverse engineering clause and something to do with OSDL, Linus' employer (if a coworker is hacking BK, they can pull your license). I knew of a few names that had caused issues on the list with Larry such as Roman Zippel, Pavel Machek and Andrea Arcangeli (who wrote the openbkweb thing a while back), but nothing that directly seemed to fit. As it turns out, it seems Andrew Tridgell started work for OSDL in January of this year, and it seems he was the straw that broke the camels back. Really, if you put a binary format in front of someone like Andrew Tridgell do you expect him to not pull it apart? Obviously there's more to the story, but I haven't seen anyone talking about it.
I know that git has been said to stand for nothing, but is it possible that it's a snide reference to Australia's favourite hacker and his lack of tact leading to the BitKeeper abortion?
update Newsforge carries an article with quotes from all concerned. If it wasn't Tridge it was going to be someone else eventually; and in the end it seems based on dollars and cents rather than code. No question, BitKeeper was really good, but what non-free software giveth it can taketh away.