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Atlassian, a provider of software development collaboration tools, has announced its acquisition of Bitbucket.org, the provider for the Mercurial distributed version control system.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Yet with more than 60,000 accounts, Bitbucket is a top provider of hosted code collaboration. The acquisition signals expanded and accelerated development of the Bitbucket service, as well as increased support for DVCS in Atlassian’s products, Atlassian and Bitbucket officials said.
“Bitbucket has a very similar philosophy and a passion for building great tools to help software developers collaborate,” said Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO and co-founder of Atlassian, in a statement. “We think DVCS is one of the most important technologies being developed for software engineers, and Mercurial offers tremendous flexibility and power.”
“This is a terrific day for Bitbucket and our customers,” said Jesper Noehr, CEO and co-founder at Bitbucket.org, also in a statement. “Atlassian is committed to providing expanded services for our customers and supports everything we’re doing with distributed version control. They have an excellent track record with past acquisitions as far as strengthening the original brand in the market.”
Atlassian is known for its own software development collaboration tools, such as JIRA and Confluence. Atlassian launched its own on-demand service for JIRA, Confluence and JIRA Studio more than two years ago and has grown to support over 36,000 hosted customers. With the addition of Bitbucket.org’s user base, Atlassian is strengthening its position as a provider of SAAS (software-as-a-service) developer tools.
A DVCS decentralizes the software repository, allowing each user to have a full copy of the source code repository on their local machine. It allows users to work productively without being tethered to a network. Mercurial is a platform-independent, open-source DVCS licensed under the GNU General Public License.
Under the Atlassian regime, Bitbucket customers will see new user-based pricing featuring unlimited private and public repositories, Atlassian said in a press release. The new pricing plan offers unlimited disk space, which is a clear win for small companies and startups looking for a system that scales as their code base grows. Current Bitbucket users have the option to move to a new pricing tier or be “grandfathered” into their current plans for 12 months.
Atlassian said there are also two free code hosting pricing tiers: A free five-user, unlimited private repositories option that’s perfect for startups and small teams; and an unlimited repositories and unlimited user option that is free for public open-source projects.
In addition, for the week of Sept. 27 only, Atlassian is offering the 10-user private repository option, normally $10 per month, free for the first year. Detailed pricing is available at http://bitbucket.org/.
This acquisition follows Atlassian’s receipt of $60 million in funding from Accel Partners in August, which the company said it would use to beef up its portfolio. Bitbucket, which has led the adoption of the Mercurial DVCS, is an important complement to Atlassian’s portfolio of software development and collaboration tools, Atlassian officials said. As a provider of tools to hundreds of thousands of developers, Atlassian will remain agnostic toward version-control systems and will continue to support Subversion, CVS, Perforce, ClearCase, Mercurial and Git in its products, the company said.