Pretty cool that Linus Torvalds invented a completely distributed version control system and 20 years later we all use it to store our code in a single place.
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Didn't all this start with Linus getting into a spat with the bitkeeper dev involving some sort of punitive measure as a response to somebody making a reverse-engineered FOSS client? I don't remember the details and I'm sure I have at least half of them wrong, but that's easily one of the most disastrous decisions in the history of the software-business right up there with valve turning down minecraft and EA refusing to make sports games for the SEGA dreamcast (that last one isn't as well known but it led to SEGA launching the 2k sports brand to which outlasted the dreamcast and eventually got sold to a different company but otherwise still exists today and is still kicking EA's ass on basketball games).
It's a joke that the bitkeeper dev has two revision control named after him, Mercurial and Git.
And while NBA 2k destroyed NBA Live it took until 2009 for that to start happening (long after Sega ownership), mainly down to sliding standards in EA’s NBA Live titles and eventually some disastrous EA launches.
But there were already quite a handful of other distributed version control systems around by the time git showed up.
So if Linus hadn't written git, perhaps we would be using darcs these days. And then we'd be debating whether people are using darcs the way it was intended. Or bazaar or monotone or mercurial etc.
I don't think what the original authors of any one tool intended matters very much, when there were multiple implementations of the idea around.