Code Repository Atlassian Buys Competitor BitBucket

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Code Repository Atlassian Buys Competitor BitBucket

Posted by kdawson on Thursday September 30, 2010 @06:44PM from the lazy-shrug dept.

Roblimo writes "Wow. Atlassian sent press releases out about this, and we're happy for them. But isn't Git easy to install and use — for free, even if your project is proprietary and secret, not open source and public? Whatever. Some people seem to feel better about proprietary software than about FOSS, and the majority of Atlassian's business comes from meeting the needs of behind-the-firewall, proprietary code repositories. At least Atlassian has free versions of its repository for FOSS and small-scale proprietary developers. Which is sort of nice."

23 of 150 comments (clear)

Code Repository? by nacturation · 2010-09-30 18:48 · Score: 4, Informative

Atlassian is a corporation, not a code repository.

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Oh yeah, I had to google them by MichaelSmith · 2010-09-30 18:54 · Score: 2, Interesting

I have seen their name inside a huge mess of java COTS which I was shovelling around as a part of a my day job. I doubt their main business is going to be operating bitbucket, more likely charging ten thousand bucks a seat for use of a copy of bitbucket inside corporate intranets, probably with some useless eclipse integration thrown in.

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1. Re:Oh yeah, I had to google them by Courageous · 2010-10-01 01:49 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Their wiki is pleasant to use and a snap to manage. All of their products are quite affordable to any corporation. Typically something like $8K will get you an unlimited user edition. Sometimes less, depends on which product.
  C//
Git by spec8472 · 2010-09-30 18:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

"But isn't Git easy to install and use"
Yes, for certain users and environments.
In my experience, The folks who use Mercurial are more likely to be on Windows.
Mercurial tooling isn't as polished as the Subversion equivalents, but it's lightyears ahead of the Git tooling.
I'd be happy enough to pay for good Git tooling on Windows, but there doesn't appear to be a way to do so. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
1. Re:Git by WWWWolf · 2010-09-30 20:54 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  I'd be happy enough to pay for good Git tooling on Windows, but there doesn't appear to be a way to do so.
  What are you talking about? msysgit is dead simple to install, and provides you with a perfectly functional Bash shell.
  Yeah, I've been wondering how to increase the usability further, by using zsh instead of Bash, but this is not really a pressing issue since Bash is pretty awesome too.
2. Re:Git by BasilBrush · 2010-09-30 21:17 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  You're right.
  
  But isn't Git easy to install and use -- for free, even if your project is proprietary and secret, not open source and public? Whatever. Some people seem to feel better about proprietary software than about FOSS
  Git does the job. But no, it isn't easy to use. It has an unintuitive set of commands, and various rudimentary, half-assed, poorly designed visual apps.
  e.g.
  git reset --soft HEAD^
  WTF?
  The proprietary Perforce dates from an earlier generation of SCM, and has a single code repository, rather than a distributed scheme. But it's commands and it's visual tool feel like they were actually designed. They are easy to learn, and need far less referring back to the manual. That's one of the reasons why people "feel better about proprietary software than FOSS".
3. Re:Git by yuriks · 2010-09-30 22:23 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  It has perfectly fine branching, see http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-mercurial/
  On another note, what kind of retarded wrote the summary? It makes no mention of who Atlassian or what Bitbucket are and instead spends time being an inflammatory git apology that doesn't even make any sense given that Mercurial is also opensource and free.
  - a git/github and hg/bitbucket user
4. Re:Git by Omnifarious · 2010-10-01 01:19 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  You should give Mercurial a try. The thing that got me to use it in 2005, when it was pre-1.0, was how clean and obvious the command line interface was. I don't generally use graphical tools for development work, so I can't gauge the various GUIs available for it, but I do know that a lot of people like TortoiseHG.
  I've used Perforce as well, and it has its strange quirks and complexities too, though I agree that git's command line interface leaves a great deal to be desired in comparison. I think Mercurial's command line interface is more intuitive and clearer than Perforce's.
  
  --
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Wow. by FuckingNickName · 2010-09-30 18:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

I can't understand what the article summary is getting at. A reposting of a press release? An expression of /.'s parent company's interest in some organisation? Or a "tweet" accidentally posted as a /. article? A side effect of think-aloud sleep-typing?
1. Re:Wow. by dncsky1530 · 2010-09-30 19:13 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Yea I don't know what is going on today but the quality of many of these summaries has been awful. This one tops it off with numerous mistakes in the title alone.
  
  I'm also not sure what Roblimo's problem with Atlassian or proprietary software is; from my experience Atlassian produces fairly good software and charges far less than competitors.
  
  Also, how about linking to the actual press release or a news story that contains more than commentary?
2. Re:Wow. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-09-30 19:23 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I can't understand what the article summary is getting at. A side effect of think-aloud sleep-typing?
  I'd go with the sleep typing, but with the caveat that it's a brain-addled crack baby doing the sleep typing.
  
  the majority of Atlassian's business comes from meeting the needs of behind-the-firewall, proprietary code repositories
  That came straight out of Roblimo's crackpipe. So the majority of Atlassian's business comes from meeting the needs of proprietary code repositories? I didn't know that code repositories had needs, but I guess advanced ones like fanboy Roblimo's Git have gained sentience and are making demands, which Atlassian now makes the majority of its money from. By, uh... servicing the demands those repositories are making. Or... something.
  Atlassian's cash cow has always been Jira, its bug tracker.
  I think Roblimo's lost his marbles or something. The only point of this piece-o-shit article is to bash proprietary software and blow his FOSS horn out of his butthole like a Stallman-scented vuvuzela.
3. Re:Wow. by MrEricSir · 2010-09-30 20:00 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  That makes a hell of a lot more sense than the article summary.
  
  --
  There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
4. Re:Wow. by kiwimate · 2010-10-01 03:00 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  No kidding. I am not one who usually comments on article submissions or the quality of the summary - I just ignore articles if I'm not interested in them - but this summary would (hopefully) be marked as troll if it was read as a comment. Given that something this rubbishy is posted by a /. editor, it's driving me to read /. less and less these days. Rationale - if this tripe is what makes it on to the front page, and from an editor, then my assurance of the quality of what's posted and what's left out is way down. What other value does /. have for me?
5. Re:Wow. by Callandor · 2010-10-01 03:53 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  If I had mod points, I'd mod this up. As a Mercurial user for over a year and a Bitbucket user for just under a year, I was very disappointed to read this story in my RSS. Not only is it old news (Bitbucket made this announcement on Tuesday), but it is full of inaccuracies and obviously written by a git fanboy. I've been using Jira and Confluence for several years now and I have no love for Atlassian and their products, but I don't hate them, either. At a glance, this announcement makes Bitbucket both better than it was and more attractive than GitHub. Maybe Atlassian will make some business decisions in the future that make Bitbucket less attractive, but for now, this is good news. There's no reason to be all negative about it, especially in the lead story. Troll is right.
Why does the fact Git is free matter here? by Omnifarious · 2010-09-30 19:03 · Score: 5, Informative

Mercurial is just as free, and just as easy to set up. Code hosting repositories are about someone else managing your connectivity, storage and backups for you, not about them building DVCS software for you.

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Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
1. Re:Why does the fact Git is free matter here? by mysidia · 2010-09-30 19:11 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Yes.... and until there's a cheap hosting provider that offers WebDAV, Bitbucket is a good option. However, if you're an enterprise, such as a bank, you might be concerned about the risk of your code repository site getting hacked.... in that regard, Open Source projects are more amenable to services like this... at least until DVCS clients support host-proof encryption of files on the server.
  OTOH they can offer web-based tools that make it easy to visualize changes and other things that would be a pain to setup.
  Every minute you or people in your organization are dicking around with the DVCS and scripts on your PC that you're trying to use as an ad-hoc web server for code hosting, is a minute that you are not coding.
  There's some value to having a code repository provider do all the heavy lifting.... just make sure you keep backups of your own.
Horde of shit by Anonymous Coward · 2010-09-30 19:59 · Score: 3, Interesting

So all you need to do to get an article on the front page of Slashdot these days is a factually incorrect, barely coherent rambling shite of text, provided it bashes proprietary software and sings the praises of FOSS.
Slashdot: news for narrow minded, deluded nerds
kdawson, master of useless summaries by bigrat · 2010-09-30 22:24 · Score: 5, Interesting

Atlassian makes code tracking and corporate-friendly wiki products. They're pretty nice, actually. It's pretty easy to write plugins that add flexible functionality to their products. I was and am a pretty big fan of Jira and Confluence, and they're pretty responsive to their customers. Their products are (last I checked) pretty reasonably priced, and integrate into Subversion, CVS, and other source control products pretty easily - including Git.
Last I checked, Git didn't really lend itself to project issue tracking - which is what Jira does. So if you must bitch about non-free Jira, you could at least make an *intelligent* article comparison to a open-source issue-tracker like Trac (another excellent product).
Alas, we're unlikely to see any intelligent comparisons from kdawson. The "lazy-shrug" dept is all too relevant here, but not for the reasons kdawson used it.
1. Re:kdawson, master of useless summaries by bigrat · 2010-10-01 02:20 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Also: way to change the article summary without an "Edit" notation, guys. That's awesome work, /. The summary is still incoherent.
Don't forget github.com by Ouija · 2010-09-30 23:37 · Score: 2, Informative

You are remiss in not mentioning github.com which does the favor of free, immediate online hosting of OSS projects and content under git. I don't know how many presenters I've seen with their slides and demo code all on github. It's the killer app that makes git really rock.

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Last Straw by Seakip18 · 2010-10-01 00:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

That's it. I'm doing what others have done and blocking kdawson. This summary is crap and should never have been posted.

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Horrible Summary by Opusbloom · 2010-10-01 00:53 · Score: 2, Insightful

Wow, is there a prize for worst summary ever?
"majority of Atlassian's business comes from ... proprietary code repositories
1. Atlassian doesn't have any products that are code repositories. It has one product that is a viewer for code repositories; Fisheye. It supports SSubversion, Perforce, CVS, CleareCase, Git and Mercurial.
2. I'm not privy to atlassian's financials, but I'm willing to bet that most of their money comes from Jira, with confluence a close second. Fisheye was an acquisition that they did a few years back when they bought Cenequa.
News for Nerds? More like Editorializing for Nerds.
Re:Git lacks tracking capabilities by Florian+Weimer · 2010-10-01 07:41 · Score: 3, Insightful

Which development branch? B's? You do realise that since git is distributed, A's and B's and the master upstream repositories are three completely distinct repositories.
Most projects (even non-corporate ones) have a shared, centralized repository to which more than person can push, so the push attribution problem arises.
One reason for centralized repositories is that you cannot have decentralized deployment. Your organization has only got one www.example.org server (cluster), so eventually, there is a very strong constraint which linearizes development. Certain build and testing infrastructure also strongly favors linearity.

First of all, non-fast-forward pushes are not allowed by default.
After the merge, it is a fast-forward push, and the server cannot distinguish it from new, legitimate development. The problem is not that Git doesn't prevent the push (after all, you need to be able to get new commits into the repository). The problem is that out of the box, Git does not keep track of who pushes what. Out of band solutions exist, and those hosters typically provide that.