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MySQL quits Torvalds' former BitKeeper love interest

Embraces the Canonical religion

By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Developer, 19th June 2008 19:22 GMT

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MySQL has ended its five-year relationship with BitKeeper and handed all code management for its database to a Canonical-backed system to secure broader community input on development.

Sun's open-source database has migrated its code to Bazaar, a distributed, free revision control system sponsored and supported by Canonical, also supporting the Ubuntu Linux distro.

MySQL's vice president of community relations Kaj Arnö blogged a "more open" product was required as the goal "remains to expand our external contributor base."

Used by Linus Torvalds to maintain Linux until 2005, BitKeeper had been criticized and been responsible for the elder statesmen of Linux and open source tearing at each others’ throats because its license was not considered friendly to open-source projects.

While BitKeeper had published a free client for the community "this client is unfortunately limited to a few read-only operations," Arno said. Bazaar is a GNU project licensed under the GPL.

On a features basis, Bazaar also offers the prospect of adapting to different project workflows.

Separately, one of the industry's most popular software configuration management (SCM) tools for distributed projects has reached version 1.5. The latest edition of CollabNet's Subversion, released Thursday, now features the ability to check out only a portion of a source-code tree and to share code repositories to help improve performance of servers used in development. You can read more here.®

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