Atlassian acquires Mercurial hosting service Bitbucket

Of the available free distributed version control systems (DVCS), two have been most favoured by software developers; Git and Mercurial. While Git, has gained a large commercial platform in the form of GitHub, such a platform is exactly what's been missing for Mercurial. Although not having a major sponsor hasn't slowed down the system's popularity and success, the acquisition of Bitbucket by Australian software firm Atlassian may trigger quite a few changes. Bitbucket is a popular code repository service similar to GitHub, but used for Mercurial projects, and has about 60,000 users.

By taking over the Bitbucket team, Atlassian, the makers of the JIRA issue tracking system and the Confluence wiki software, are gaining Mercurial expertise. Atlassian said that the decision to take over Bitbucket was made to add a software configuration management product to their portfolio. According to Jay Simons, the head of Atlassian's sales and marketing team, Mercurial was chosen because it offers better enterprise functionality than Git. However, the executive said that Atlassian won't focus exclusively on Mercurial for version control, and that Git will continue to be supported in the company's products.

Atlassian was apparently able to go ahead with the acquisition after receiving $60 million in venture capital from Accel Partners in July. Once the take-over is complete, the software firm plans to introduce a new pricing structure, integrate Bitbucket with Atlassian products and add new functionality. For example, the vendor plans to offer free and unlimited use of the Bitbucket service to small teams of up to five developers as well as open source projects. Furthermore, a special "opening offer" will allow teams of up to ten developers to use the service free of charge for a year (and then $10 per month after that).

(djwm)