Larry McVoy

Larry McVoy (born 1962 in Concord, Massachusetts, United States) is the CEO of BitMover, the company that makes BitKeeper, a version control system that was used from February 2002 to early 2005 to manage the source code of the Linux kernel.

He earned BS and MS degrees in computer science in 1985 and 1987, respectively, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and has been employed by Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics and Google. His work generally included performance enhancements to the various Unix operating systems developed by his employers. While McVoy worked at Sun, he worked on a peer-to-peer SCM system named TeamWare that would form the basis of his later BitKeeper product.

McVoy started working with the Linux kernel around its 0.9.7 version and developed the LMbench kernel benchmark. LMbench was maintained until 2009 by Carl Staelin.

The BitKeeper source control system was also developed and integrated into the Linux development process, but disagreements between McVoy and some members of the Linux development community prompted the development of the git tool that began serving as the source control system for the Linux kernel in 2005.

While working at Sun in the early 1990s, McVoy and a number of other high-profile Unix community members urged the company to open-source their flagship Unix product, SunOS, to compete with Microsoft's new Windows NT operating system. The proposal would have created a copyleft version of SunOS at a time before Linux had reached its 1.0 version.

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