Comment by technoweenie

I'm really happy to see large file support in Git core. Any external solution would have similar opt-in procedures. I really wanted it to work seamlessly with as few extra commands as possible, so the API was constrained to the smudge and clean filters in the '.gitattributes' file.

Though I did work hard to remove any vendor lock-in by working directly with Atlassian and Microsoft pretty early in the process. It was a great working relationship, with a lot of help from Atlassian in particular on the file locking API. LFS shipped open source with compatible support in 3 separate git hosts.