BitKeeper is a software tool for revision control (configuration management, SCM, etc.) of computer source code. A sophisticated distributed system, BitKeeper competes largely against other professional systems such as Rational ClearCase and Perforce. BitKeeper is produced by BitMover Inc., a privately held company based in Campbell, California and owned by CEO Larry McVoy, who had previously designed TeamWare.
BitKeeper builds upon many of the TeamWare concepts. Its key selling point is the ease with which distributed development teams can keep their own local source repositories and still work with the central repository.
BitKeeper is proprietary software and is normally sold or leased (as part of a support package) to medium or large corporations.
History
BitMover used to provide access to the system for certain open source or free software projects, the most famous (and controversial) of which was the source code of the Linux kernel. The license for the "community" version of BitKeeper had allowed for developers to use the tool at no cost for open source or free software projects, provided those developers did not participate in the development of a competing tool (such as CVS, GNU Arch, Subversion or ClearCase) for the duration of their usage of BitKeeper plus one year. This restriction applied regardless of whether the competing tool is open/free or proprietary. This version of BitKeeper also required that certain meta-information about changes be stored on computer servers operated by BitMover (www.openlogging.org), an addition that makes it impossible for community version users to run projects of which BitMover is unaware.
Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitkeeper
