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."

"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.

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.

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.

The open-source development model can can be powerful and incredibly beneficial for any software development project. Yet, even most open-source projects do not follow this style of development. Today, I want to talk a bit about why this is the case, and what can be done to set your project on the right path to enjoy the advantages of the open-source development process.

Bazaar is a powerful, next-generation source control system that adapts to the dynamics of any development team. This article is an introduction to Bazaar.

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.