Alex headshot

AlBlue’s Blog

Macs, Modularity and More

Atlassian acquires BitBucket

2010

Altassian announced that they have acquired popular Mercurial (Hg) hosting site BitBucket. As part of the announcement, 5-user accounts will remain free, whilst a tiered pricing system for those with more than 5-user accounts is priced in support contracts accordingly. Those with existing subscription accounts have had them cancelled; BitBucket used to collect payments through PayPal, but Atlassian have their own support/pricing structures. Those subscribers will receive a mail message indicating the upcoming changes.

Mercurial is a popular Distributed Version Control System, and BitBucket is to Mercurial what GitHub is to Git. According to the FAQ on the acquisition, BitBucket now has over 60,000 users on its books. (This corresponds with GitHub's announcement of 1 million repositories; though an average of 5 repositories per user gives an approximate 200,000 GitHub users.) The acquisition can only help to improve the popularity of Mercurial as a DVCS.

Mercurial is one of many version control systems that are supported by Atlassian's products. These include Git and Mercurial support for FishEye and Crucible, and third-party support for Bamboo. They are committed to delivering native support for DVCS in future versions of their tools.