I finished watching a video on git by Linus Torvalds located here.  He spoke about the differences in Source Code Management.  Source Code Management is similar to PDM systems.  git was designed to be distributed, branched, and merged.  Branching would be taking a SolidWorks file, modifying it, and then merge back into the SolidWorks file database.

This question/discussion is probably more for the developers.  What can we learn from git to better develop PDM systems?

I'll post more later about git but you can get anything I am going to say from Linus from the video above.