At the heart of every serious software development project is the use of some kind of version control code repository. For Ubuntu Linux, that version control system is its own Bazaar (bzr) system, which make it easier for the project to encourage and manage developer participation.

"The Bazaar version control system recently became a GNU project. We set out several years ago to build a version control system that would suit the collaboration and cooperation at the heart of free software, and Bazaar is the result of that effort.

LONDON, December 14, 2007 -- Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu and Bazaar projects, today announced the general availability of Bazaar 1.0, a version control system enabling multiple, distributed developers to contribute to software projects independently in a controlled, managed way.

Open-source projects often face the problem of keeping track of a project's code, while avoiding stifling developers' creativity. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, claims it has a solution to that problem: Bazaar 1.0, its new version control system.

Sometimes open-source development projects plod along at a slow walk. Sometimes they develop at a gallop. Bazaar, the version control system from Canonical, is entering the Kentucky Derby.

"The Bazaar version control system development team is happy to announce availability of bzr 2.0.0 [...] Bazaar is free software (GNU GPL 2+), a part of the GNU project, and supported by Canonical Ltd."

During the last month, MySQL code has been migrated from BitKeeper to Bazaar. Bazaar is a distributed, free revision control system sponsored and supported by Canonical, the company behind the fast-growing Linux distribution Ubuntu.

Well, no, not a food olive bazaar (though that would be tasty), but rather Olive, a GTK GUI for Bazaar, a version control system similar to GIT and Subversion. We’re not going to go into the differences between the systems, but rather focus on this interesting application, now merged into the Bazaar GTK project.

Eric Raymond's software bazaar is a fantasy. What really goes on in open source projects has nothing to do with his "great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches".