Atlassian, the company behind developer tools such as JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo and Clover, has acquired Bitbucket.org, a hosted code collaboration site for the popular Mercurial distributed version control system (DVCS). The aquision comes shortly after a $60M investment from Accel Partners in Atlassian, and strengthens Atlassian's on-demand SaaS offerings, which started with JIRA Studio.
Along with the launch comes a new price structure:
We're nuking the price, immediately. On Tuesday we'll offer FREE hosting for 5-devs, unlimited private repositories. That just doesn't exist anywhere else. Paid versions are less than half the cost of alternatives.
For developers and teams the advantage is clear:
Any small team of developers needs at least two things: a place to dump code, and a place to track issues and bugs. We now offer both. And we have big plans for how they'll work together.
As well as making sense in Atlassian's portfolio:
We want to provide a complete suite of tools for product development teams. What Adobe does for designers, we do for technical teams building something. We offer kickass tools for the most of the product development cycle - concept and launch planning, issue and project tracking, code coverage and reviews. Code hosting was a gap.
Existing Bitbucket users will be accommodated by moving them to the new pricing, or having their account grandfathered for twelve months. Bitbucket will continue to host code for Adium, MailChimp, Opera and other great opensource projects.