Microsoft is reportedly moving its CodePlex open source hosting service project to a new tier that will feature support for the Git distributed version-control system. Linus Torvald's Linux kernel development repository has enjoyed increasing popularity since its introduction in April of 2005.

Widely lauded for its commanding branching and merging support, Microsoft's move to align towards Git for this project is, arguably, further affirmation of its worth in the eyes of developers.

CodePlex was originally supported on Microsoft's TFS centralized version-control system as well as Mercurial; the latter sharing both of Git's open source and distributed credentials.

While it has been argued that Mercurial provides better tooling in some areas, Git's association with Linux, Torvalds himself, and the open source community at large may have all contributed to the project's deeper penetration and usage.

NOTE: Git's "About" pages details its core function as follows:

Like most other modern version-control systems, Git gives each developer a local copy of the entire development history, and changes are copied from one such repository to another. These changes are imported as additional development branches, and can be merged in the same way as a locally developed branch. Repositories can be easily accessed via the efficient Git protocol (optionally wrapped in ssh for authentication and security) or simply using HTTP — you can publish your repository anywhere without any special webserver configuration required.