08 September 2010, 14:50

Codeplex.com contributes $25,000 to Mercurial

Microsoft's open source project hosting site, Codeplex.com, has donated $25,000 to the developers on the GPLv2 licensed Mercurial distributed version control system (VCS). The donation comes after Mercurial founder and project manager Matt Mackall made an appeal in April for funds to allow him to work full time on Mercurial.

Mercurial is one of the supported Codeplex hosting sites version control systems; before January and the addition of native Mercurial support, the site supported only Team Foundation Server which interoperates with Subversion clients. Since then, 1,500 new projects on Codeplex have opted to use Mercurial.

In an interview with Mackall, he explained that he had only been using his free time to develop Mercurial and that this had meant the project had not progressed as quickly as it might have. With a full time focus, Mackall hopes to be able to "better leverage the community's contribution and accelerate Mercurial's development".

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