Git is a distributed, open source version control system that is fast, reliable, powerful and popular. It provides advantages over Subversion like cherry-picking, rebasing, and submodules. Git commits provide detailed information that can be exposed via APIs and plugins like the maven-git-commit-id-plugin. Tools exist to host and manage git repositories, including Gitweb for viewing repositories, Gitosis for basic access control, and Gerrit for online code reviews.