"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

"I'm happy to announce the release of version 1.3 of the Bazaar version control system. - http://bazaar-vcs.org/Download - Since 1.2, we've improved the speed of several important operations, including log, annotate, and other operations on revision history. Several bugs have been fixed and new options and features have been added, including an option to hardlink files between working trees.

"Since Linus Torvalds presentation at Google about git in May 2007, the adoption and interest for Distributed Version Control Systems has been constantly rising. We will introduce the concept of Distributed Version Control, see when to use it, why it may be better than what you're currently using, and have a look at three actors in the area: git, Mercurial and Bazaar..."

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.