How the open source movement and early version control systems like CVS, Subversion, and Git paved the way for today's remote development processes
How the early open-source movement and version control paved the way for today's remote software development processes. — Remote Tweets: @koxinga21 Tweets: Andrew Leonard / @koxinga21 : I indulged some _old school_ open source geekiness in this piece. Plus: a cameo from a hacker who changed computing history because he didn't want to leave his commune. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Andrew Leonard's Increment piece is a genealogy: it argues that the collaboration habits of today's fully remote engineering teams were invented decades earlier by open source projects coordinating through CVS, Subversion, and eventually Git. That lineage has been building in the coverage for years — Linus Torvalds looked back on a decade of Git reshaping how contributions are managed, and the commercial layer got its capstone when Microsoft bought GitHub precisely to win developers back through open source.
The timing matters: written in late 2020, the piece lands just as pandemic-era remote work turned what was once an open source idiosyncrasy into the default operating model for paid software teams — a shift GitHub's own leadership has since doubled down on.
First-order effects
- For development teams, the practical inheritance is concrete: the distributed-commit, asynchronous-review workflow they use daily was designed for volunteers who never shared an office, which is why the pivot to remote required no new process invention — only hosting, which GitHub supplies.
- GitHub sits directly downstream of this history: every practice Leonard describes converges on the platform Microsoft acquired, making the company the commercial custodian of an open source invention.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's developer-win-back strategy depends on this lineage holding — its acquisition of GitHub only pays off if the open-source-born workflow remains where developers already collaborate, which is why the company keeps investing in open source credibility rather than proprietary lock-in.
- The gaps sit around the VCS core, not inside it: as Redmonk's coverage of cloud development tooling shows, environment management still lacks the integration that version control achieved, leaving vendors to compete over the layers Git never standardized.
Third-order effects
- If hybrid work endures the way GitHub's Erica Brescia argues it will, the open source collaboration model stops being an engineering subculture and becomes organizational infrastructure — hiring, review, and release cadence all built on VCS assumptions.
- The same openness that enabled remote collaboration carries its own systemic risk: the rise of protestware shows that trusting distributed, anonymous contributors — the founding bargain of the movement — now doubles as a software supply chain exposure enterprises must manage.
The trend: Software development is consolidating around the distributed, open-contribution workflow that version control systems pioneered for open source, with platforms like GitHub turning that workflow into commercial infrastructure and its trust assumptions into an enterprise risk surface.