Linus Torvalds : I think a lot of it is just stubborn persistence. Especially Linux - I was in the right place at the right time, but others could have done their own operating system. And others did. But very few people ended up just doing it as much as I did. I've been at it for twenty years. Most developers doing some random private project for their own enjoyment don't stay with it long enough for it to ever be even release ready. Much less for decades.

With git, things were a bit different. Partly because I had a use case that was big enough (the kernel) that I could jump-start it, but partly because I really came at an old problem from a new angle, and I do think I did a good job as "architect" for the project. I really think that git has a fundamentally good design (in the case of Linux I
could just build on top of the design of Unix that had already been done), and I could push it through because Linux needed more than the existing SCM projects could offer.

But with git, a lot of the credit really does go to Junio Hamano. He's really been a great maintainer. People like that are important. Yes, open source programming is a team sport, but finding the right people is really the killer feature (the same is obviously true in the kernel too - I really do think we have a great set of maintainers. I may
complain about them and I'm somewhat infamous for my flames when things don't work, but at the same time I'm convinced there's some of the best people out there working on maintaining the kernel).