Collaboration player Atlassian has added support for the Git distributed version control system (DVCS) to its provision of the Bitbucket free code hosting service. The company says that it has taken this move strategically to give developers access to Git and so that Bitbucket customers can now have unlimited private and public repositories for both Git and Mercurial in a single account.
Having also just acquired SourceTree, a Mac client for managing repositories from Git and Mercurial DVCS systems, Atlassian is making SourceTree free for a limited time. Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO and cofounder of Atlassian has said that SourceTree provides "relief to the headache" of managing multiple repositories, allowing developers to manage and interface with multiple Git and Hg repositories visually through a client instead of the command line.
Atlassian says that Bitbucket has just had a strong year of record growth — more than tripling the number of developer accounts and adding over 350 improvements, bug fixes, and new features. The proposition is that by now adding Git support, Bitbucket offers programmers the ability to use both Git and Mercurial repositories within a single code hosting and collaboration service, without limiting the number of private or public repositories users can create and manage within a single account.
"Distributed version control is meant to be exactly that — distributed — but most services either limit the number of repositories their users can manage, or charge by repository, which discourages forking and code collaboration," said Atlassian's Mike Cannon-Brookes. "Today we're offering unlimited private and Git repos free for teams of five developers."
