Comment by lisper

> we had several distributed version control systems

None that worked well. There is a reason Git took over this space. Git is to 2005-era version control systems what Google was to Ask Jeeves and Alta Vista.

> and collaboration online was rather mature

As someone who experienced this era first hand, I respectfully disagree. Online collaboration was certainly possible, and it certainly happened, but it was not even close to what I would call "mature". It was a colossal PITA. Again, there is a reason that Linus wrote Git, and it was not just that he was bored and needed something to do. He needed a tool that would make remote collaboration on the Linux kernel less of a PITA. And he succeeded quite spectacularly.