14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's CodePlex.com team has donated $25,000 for the development of the Mercurial project, in response to the project leader's recent appeal.
Matt Mackall's Mercurial was already added as a choice on CodePlex earlier this year, so CodePlex members have the possibility of using it as a distributed version control system.
The most popular version control system on CodePlex.com remains the Team Foundation Server, nevertheless, since Mercurial was added, over 1,500 new projects started using it.
Also, many open source projects have been moved to CodePlex.com from several forges, so this can only mean that CodePlex users are happy to benefit from access to Mercurial.
Mercurial is a distributed source control management system, created some five years ago, by its current project leader, Matt Mackall.
Today it has reached the performance of having hundreds of contributors and tens of thousands of users, worldwide.
Since the project has been added on CodePlex, Microsoft has been supporting Mercurial users by giving them the opportunity of of hosting their own projects in Windows.
Unlike Team Foundation Server, Mercurial is a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS), and it has a very different model for collaborating on an open source project.
For example in DVCS, you do not check in and out changes, but an entire set of changes, aka the repository, and you also commit to the local repository, and push your changes back to CodePlex.
In an interview granted to CodePlex.com, Matt Mackall says that this donation will help him continue this work as a full-time project leader at least over the next year.
Until now, he says, he has been working on the project only in his spare time, which is why Mercurial did not make any amazing progress, but all of that will change and Mercurial's development should be seriously boosted.
As for the project's next step, Mackall cannot say for sure which feature will be finished, but apparently there is a wishlist which will be accounted for, so users should have a better compression and also faster networking.
The CodePlex community benefits from over 17,000 projects and things should get much better with this donation supporting the Mercurial project.