

Bitbucket Joins Atlassian - DVassallo
http://blog.bitbucket.org/2010/09/29/bitbucket-joins-atlassian/

======
jnoller
Wow, this is awesome (I hope!) news for Jesper and the rest of the bitbucket
team. I hope Atlassian treats them well - it should be interesting to see what
they do with things.

~~~
pufuwozu
Integration with Atlassian's tools should be very exciting. For a while now,
I've been thinking that Atlassian should try a code hosting service and
integrate their code review, code coverage and source exploration tools.
Hopefully it works out as well as I imagined it would.

I also want to point out Atlassian likes both Mercurial and Git:

[http://www.atlassian.com/summit/2010/presentations/developme...](http://www.atlassian.com/summit/2010/presentations/development-
speed/dvcs-systems-in-the-enterprise-git-mercurial.jsp)

Disclaimer: I'll be working for Atlassian next year (and now I'm hoping to
work on Bitbucket sometime).

~~~
riffraff
hear hear! For what is worth, I don't understand why they don't integrate with
existing projects as a premium service. Not only bitbucket but github, patch-
tag etc.

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rileywatkins
I don't have too much of a preference between Git and Mercurial, but the lack
of even a single free private repository on Githib makes BitBucket a more
favorable option for my numerous casual projects.

~~~
KevBurnsJr
Numerous casual projects?

Host them yourself by tunneling git over ssh. It's easier than you think.

I just made a tool to help streamline the process. <http://grit.hackyhack.net>

~~~
anthonyb
That helps with the code hosting, but what about a wiki? Bug Tracker?
Communicating with other devs? A bitbucket or github repo helps with all of
these things too.

~~~
KevBurnsJr
Absolutely. But for most casual projects, YAGNI.

~~~
anthonyb
You'd have to be pretty casual not to want a bug tracker - even for completely
internal, non-public facing, one dev projects they're invaluable for keeping
things straight, tracking todos, etc.

That said, I think there's definitely a use case for some sort of bug
tracker/wiki which can be embedded in a repository, a'la Fossil. Perhaps flat
files rather than SQLite though, so you can track changes in your repository.
Not sure how you'd get changes in though, other than via a pull request.

~~~
brendano
<http://ditz.rubyforge.org/>

~~~
anthonyb
Cool project. That's pretty much what I had in mind, except maybe some sort of
lightweight wiki, too.

~~~
troels
<http://pages.github.com/>

------
cmelbye
Interesting, unlimited repositories and disk space. I wonder if GitHub will
attempt to compete with that, their plans have only gotten worse lately.

~~~
rimantas
Number of repositories and disk space is not the reason I use GitHub.

~~~
lars512
It was a large reason I didn't choose GitHub. Who wants to manage and prune
their minor projects to fit into arbitrary limits?

~~~
cmelbye
This. We routinely have to decide which old repositories we can delete when we
want to make a new one, and it's getting old. We don't want to pay $25 more a
month just for a few more repositories.

------
dmpayton
And here I was all set to migrate my projects to Github tonight. I think I'll
stick around a bit longer and see what Atlassian can do to improve BitBucket.

On a side note, I paid my monthly subscription fee just a few days ago, but
now everyone is on the same (basic, free) plan. Is that money just out the
window?

~~~
zeemonkee
This was the email I got from Bitbucket:

"Because accounts with 5 or fewer users are free, we will be canceling your
subscription and moving you to the free plan (you will be notified by PayPal
that your Bitbucket account has been canceled)."

Not sure if that means you'll get your money back, though.

~~~
ergo14
You won't, why should you? apart the fact that it probably costs them money to
send them back, I for example am just happy that i don't have to pay from now
on. Since I have only 2 private collaborators.

------
swilliams
Unlimited _private_ repos for free? That is mighty impressive, and stacks up
very well against github (especially since I prefer hg over git).

~~~
uggedal
<http://codebasehq.com> also offers unlimited private repos (hg, git, and
svn), but not for free. They have total size restrictions as well.

~~~
ableal
I don't think it's really necessary to downvote a comment just because it
mentions a paid service.

Some users over at the reddit discussion
([http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dka7n/bitbucket...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dka7n/bitbucket_now_has_unlimited_public_and_private/))
spoke well of the 6USD/month at <http://repositoryhosting.com/>

Also, clicky for the free SVN at assembla: <http://offers.assembla.com/free-
subversion-hosting/>

~~~
rs
There's <http://xp-dev.com/> as well that has unlimited repositories and
users, only pay for the space that you use

(disclaimer: own and run xp-dev.com)

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alexgartrell
This is not totally unlike the combination of fogbugz and kiln. I wonder if
this means anything to Fog Creek, and if any of them will comment on it.

~~~
gecko
[I was a co-founder and am a primary developer of Kiln.]

Speaking purely for myself, I don't view Bitbucket as a competitor, to be
honest. It's a great tool, but serves a very different purpose.

When it comes to social code, Bitbucket's great. It's Mercurial's equivalent
to GitHub, and it fills that role awesomely. I have an account on there where
I post stuff I want to be public, including some open-source parts of Kiln's
source code, such as our new kbfiles extension.

Kiln, on the other hand, is really focused a lot more on making DVCS a really
great experience for companies. A lot of the stuff that makes GitHub and
Bitbucket great--the whole social experience--kind of gets in the way of just
getting stuff done in a corporate environment. You still want the ability to
have personal repos and branches and everything, but you also want really
tight integration with bug tracking, really easy ways to follow everything
going on with a project in the forms of activity feeds and comprehensive
search, APIs to manage everything, a really solid code discussion system so
that your developers can talk about code and make sure it's really great
before it gets integrated, the ability to quickly answer questions like, "What
bugs were open in this point release?" and "Have I contacted customers
affected by this to let them know it's fixed?" Kiln and FogBugz together
provide those things right now.

I'm sure Bitbucket and Jira _could_ provide that functionality eventually, but
it's not what they do right now. And I think that's fine: we _need_ a service
that provides really great social tools, and Bitbucket's that. And we _need_ a
DVCS hosting solution that's awesome for companies, and Kiln's that. Given
that something like 90% of developers still use centralized SCMs, there's
piles and piles of room for both of us to coexist peacefully.

------
mml
Too bad, hg and bb are great, but Atlassian makes abominable tools.

On the upside, my account is now cheaper (free).

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
Like what?

(Disclaimer: I used to work for Atlassian)

~~~
brandon
I'm a fan of Confluence and JIRA from a user perspective, but oh man, they are
terrible products to install and administer.

For instance, we're an Atlassian shop through and through; we also use
Fisheye, Crucible and Bamboo. As such, we wanted to tie all of these apps up
to Atlassian's SSO solution (Crowd). Take a look at the integration guide for
JIRA¹. The process can require finding missing JARs, editing Java property
files, commenting and uncommenting forests of XML, and then you're still
subject to a bunch of arbitrary restrictions around group membership (super
fun when paired with AD). The whole thing feels like an afterthought that was
never given the respect of a proper _feature_.

I personally get the impression that Atlassian's product codebases are pretty
fragmented as a result of their grow-via-acquisitions strategy. On the front
end, the products are good looking and usable. On the back end, things are a
mess. Still, it's my job to run the mess, so I'll keep slogging.

¹
[http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Integrating+Cr...](http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Integrating+Crowd+with+Atlassian+JIRA)

~~~
daveoflynn
Yup, the JIRA-Crowd integration experience sucks. It'll be fixed in JIRA 4.3
and Confluence 3.5.

What group membership restrictions do you mean?

(edit: I'm the Product Manager responsible for Crowd).

~~~
leftcoaster
Crowd never should have happened.

For 3 (or was it 4 or 5?) years, jira users have voted for an enhancement to
drive jira groups out of LDAP. The reward for this loyalty? Crowd: a whole new
product, with a separate, spendy license. Bizarrely, Confluence is capable of
doing this LDAP integration without Crowd. But rather than port that over to
Jira and make some users happy, Atlassian decided to take another bite out of
their wallets instead.

I actually bought Crowd, out of desperation to solve the problem, but dropped
it after a year. Trivially obvious features weren't implemented. It ended up
being easier to just script what we needed ourselves.

And don't even get me started on how painful it is to upgrade Atlassian
products. _shudder_

~~~
daveoflynn
Crowd's LDAP code will hit JIRA trunk the day after 4.2 branches for release.
So, good LDAP is coming for both JIRA and Confluence.

Yes, it's years later than it should have, but we are finally getting our
house in order on that front.

In the next month or so, we'll also be starting to work on a better
installation/upgrade experience for JIRA and Confluence. Would you be
interested in chatting about what drives you nuts in the upgrade process? I
want to make sure we sort out as many of the problems as possible.
doflynn@atlassian.com if you have the time.

~~~
modoc
I can't speak for leftcoaster, but what drives me crazy about the upgrade
process is this:
[http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA041/Upgrading+JI...](http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA041/Upgrading+JIRA)

I'm just upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1, I shouldn't need to create a new
installation, a whole new database, re-download, install, and configure every
plugin I use, disable e-mail access, etc...

I want to be able to run an upgrade script, or drop in a new war and when it
starts up it asks if I want to upgrade things. Or an inline upgrade. Look at
Wordpress, Gallery, MS Office, any OS, etc... for examples.

My startup uses Crowd, Jira, and Confluence. However, due to the complexity
and risk (we've had issues crop up in the past) of upgrading, we tend to run
several versions behind, waiting until there's some "must have" new feature or
improvement.

And while we do use Crowd (and while I generally really like Atlassian
products) the Crowd LDAP support is really lacking, and the complexity of
hooking Jira/Confluence into Crowd is a pain (no write support for Fedora
389?). It should be a simple flag, maybe even changable from the admin. Not a
bunch of hacking in .properties, .xml, and libs.

~~~
daveoflynn
Upgrade points noted.

JIRA 4.3 and Confluence 3.5 will make it much easier to connect to Crowd. No
editing of files required.

We don't have write support for the Posix schema scheduled for Crowd, I'm
afraid, so no promises on that front.

~~~
modoc
I think the only reason we're using Crowd now is to map LDAP groups into Jira.

~~~
hillsy
We've had Crowd deployed for two years to handle web app auth. Configuration,
deployment were a bit painful.

We're pulling it out and writing our own - seems to be the only way to get
necessary features such as delegated administration which have been on the
Crowd roadmap for years now.

------
zalew
_All accounts now have unlimited private and public repositories and we've
removed disk-space restrictions! Your new plan is completely free, forever._

Made my day!

I hope this cooperation will result in a more dynamic progress of BB.

------
chrisbroadfoot
Mmmm... Unlimited private repositories. Is this enough for me to move to hg
from git?!?!?!

~~~
slig
Seriously, 6usd/month gets you an unlimited repositories(up to 2 GB)
git/hg/svn on RepositoryHosting.com .

~~~
cmelbye
It's Trac though, nothing compared to BitBucket.

------
markstahler
I used to be a Bitbucket customer but moved to repositoryhosting.com a few
months ago. This is great news as I will likely return to Bitbucket. I stopped
using the service this year because I needed many small repos (<15mb) and
didn't want to pay upwards of $20-30 per month. Repositoryhosting.com offers
unlimited repositories for $6 flat per month. If you require additional space
you pay for that.

I really don't get the pricing plans for companies like Bitbucket and Github.
$5-10 per month for personal projects is fine but up past that? Do these
companies think for single user accounts all these repositories are active at
once? How much more does it cost Github to store an additional repository for
me (not to even mention gists which are stored as repos) because they are
charging $1 per month to backup a few mbs. I would love to know the average
repo size.

~~~
ghshephard
Look at it from a different angle - how many customers out there require code
repositories? Now, let's say you want to have a 20-30 employee company, with a
likely $3 million salary overhead and $10-15 Million dollar exit in 5-7 years.

How much do you have to charge per customer to hit that target? Remember, you
have to cover Salary + Hosting/Hardware Overhead.

The most likely response would be "Why would someone expect to make that kind
of money off of hosting repositories?"

My answer would be "Why would you expect a First Class Entrepreneur / Founding
Team to commit their time to a endeavor that didn't have that class of pay
out?"

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steilpass
I will keep my private account at github. Its my way of saying thanks for
their free open source hosting.

------
davidwparker
Congrats BitBucket folks. My $0.02... I wonder if GitHub have had any offers
to be bought out? It seems like they would, and they are continuously growing
in personnel, so they can't be doing too badly. I'm also surprised that they
said Atlassian will offer private repos for free forever. Forever seems like a
pretty big promise, IMO.

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krosaen
I prefer mercurial over git, but being on bitbucket is starting to feel like
being on Orkut when everyone else is on Facebook. Even with this announcement
I'll probably start all new personal projects on github for the better
visibility and collaboration with the hacker community.

~~~
ergo14
Yeah well... thanks to people like you bitbucket will struggle to gain bigger
community. Why not start projects on bitbucket, and then if it will not work
out, move to github? I DID get help from other people and commited my patches
to some projects on bitbucket(also did on git). It's not like you wont get
help on bb - its just a tool in the end.

------
squidsoup
One amusing thing only tangentially related to this - the unofficial mercurial
plugin for Jira has been broken (in Windows) for months. We've been
considering buying FishEye just to get decent hg integration!

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ergo14
One thing i'm hoping for are better community building tools on bitbucket for
projects to promote themselves. This is the only part missing to get a bigger
community

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billc
I am not a fan of Atlassian tools. But I like Bitbucket a lot. So my only hope
it that the graft improves the host.

~~~
jespern
Indeed. We won't be seeing any graft vs. host, at the very least.

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jshen
I hope my company doesn't switch from git to mercurial now since we use
atlassian for jira and confluence :/

