SAN FRANCISCO, April 5th 2005 /PRNewswire/ -- BitMover, the technology leader of enterprise development tools, announced today that it will focus exclusively on the development of the commercial version of their industry leading configuration management system, BitKeeper.

"We've experienced explosive growth over the last two years." said Bob Burres, VP of Sales. "We're doubling year over year and our commercial users exceed those using BitKeeper on Open Source projects. Focusing our energy on our cutting edge commercial products will ensure we maintain our competitive advantage and allow us to continue delivering world class development tools."

"BitKeeper is already one of the most advanced SCM products on the market," said Holt Mebane, an architect in HP's Imaging and Personal Systems Group. "BitKeeper has an exciting roadmap, and we recognize that a BitKeeper product with these features will be invaluable to our firmware design efforts."

The commercial version of BitKeeper has an exciting roadmap which includes:

• Integration with major IDEs such as Eclipse
• Revamped GUI tools conforming to Windows standards
• Defect tracking database with a powerful integrated scripting language
• Peer review database system
• Cherry picking across branches
• Scaling to 1,000,000 changesets in one repository
• Scaling to an unlimited number of files
• Module (subtree) support
• Enhanced binary management
• Better license management and control
• Management reporting tools

As part of this focus, BitMover has replaced the free version of BitKeeper with the recently released open source BitKeeper client. Those developers who desire additional functionality may choose to migrate to the more powerful commercial version of BitKeeper.

Major projects hosted at www.bkbits.net, such as the Linux kernel, will continue to be hosted and updated there.

Our relationship with the Open Source community has been evolving and many of the key developers have already migrated to the commercial version of BitKeeper. Those developers will continue to enjoy the full features of BitKeeper.

"Both BitMover and the Open Source community have benefited from our relationship over the last 5 years" said BitMover's CEO Larry McVoy. "BitKeeper is a more robust product and the development pace for the Linux kernel has more than doubled as a result of BitKeeper's implementation of the Delta Development Model."

"BK has been a huge boon to the kernel in the way it taught us how to work better" said Linux leader Linus Torvalds. "We will continue to apply those lessons going forward".

"The highly distributed model of BitKeeper really revolutionized kernel development, allowing us all to work in parallel, and essentially giving a lot more people commit privileges to the upstream tree, while still maintaining the human 'trust tree' that Linus has spent over a decade building." said Jeff Garzik, a senior Linux developer at Red Hat.

For those projects which do not wish to migrate to commercial BitKeeper, BitMover will continue to maintain the repositories hosted on bkbits.net and will provide CVS repositories of the history on a time-permitting basis. CVS repositories for the Linux kernel already exist and are mirrored on kernel.org.

About BitMover

Founded in 1998, BitMover Inc. is a privately held Silicon Valley-based company that produces BitKeeper. BitKeeper shortens the software development lifecycle by providing the industry's only peer-to-peer collaborative development tool. Many of the world's largest independent software and hardware vendors have used BitKeeper to more effectively manage their development projects. Companies from startups to the Fortune 50 use BitKeeper to increase their productivity. BitKeeper enables best practices in software development through powerful workflow capabilities, gives managers enhanced control over their projects, and enables greater productivity in engineers through best-in-class merge technology. More than 60,000 BitKeeper seats are deployed worldwide. For more information, please see http://www.bitkeeper.com.