Working in an indie town like Portland, I hear geeks drop “GitHub” in their lingo like they did about apps back in the day. Code repositories are hot. They represent how collaboration is moving deeper into development cycles and permitting universal ways to fork code.
GitHub is so hot that the company recruited Eston Bond, a product designer from Facebook. It’s of note that Eston is the second Facebook star to take work in the more obscure world of enterprise and developer technology companies. Facebook’s Monica Keller recently joined Socialcast, a startup with some well regarded activity stream technology.
But there’s another code repository out there that also gets points in the geek circles. It’s called Bitbucket and they were just acquired by Atlassian, the company that wants to be the Adobe of the developer world. Adobe has served as the designer’s tool box. Atlassian seeks to be the go to source for product development tools.
This is Atlassian’s first acquisition. And it won’t by any means be its last. The company has a cool $60 million in the bank from Accel Partners that it plans to spend on acquisitions.
BitBucket fills a gap in the Atlassian product line. Atlassian has an issue tracker but it did not have a repository. In the past, Atlassian had been platform agnostic about code repositories. It will remain agnostic but will use the opportunity with BitBucket to change the business model.
Atlassian launched its own on-demand service for JIRA, Confluence and
JIRA Studio more than two years ago. With Bitbucket.org’s 60,000 users, Atlassian is
strengthening its position as a provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) developer tools.
Atlassian will offer a tier one free service that is designed for startups and small teams. It’s a starter program of sorts that allows up to five people to use the account.
Pricing at all levels will be based upon the number of users. Bitbucket used a model based upon disk space usage.
BitBucket’s adoption of Mercurial played a part in the acquisition. Mercurial is a “source control,” management tool. It’s favored in the enterprise. With Bitbucket, the system can visualize changes in the code.
The magic for code repositories comes with distributed version control systems (DVCS), which allows developers to commit locally whether online or offlline. Developers may branch, merge and monitor the activity in a source tree.
Mercurial is particularly popular with Windows users, a sizable community that Atlassian serves.
