The sites and services existing under the SourceForge umbrella have experienced some significant changes in the past several months. In the first three months of 2009, we've seen management changes and the re-direction of some SourceForge properties. SourceForge is ushering in another change -- free hosting for the Git, Bazaar, and Mercurial source code management systems. These services are now available to every open source project registered with SourceForge.net.

The new source code management (SCM) systems supplement SourceForge's Subversion and CVS support.

Many open source projects have been switching from CVS and Subversion to more flexible, distributed version-control systems. One of these is Git, written by Linus Torvalds, originally for use on the Linux kernel. There are a few ways to get the base Git package (with the Git command-line client and two basic graphical front ends) installed under Mac OS X. Our friends over at TheAppleBlog have a good post up on six of the best graphical tools for managing Git. Check it out. 

Sun Microsystems has launched a new effort to compete with Google Code and various Forge sites with its beta site Project Kenai (pronounced Keen-Eye). According to a blog post, the site was launched quietly on Friday, and a primary goal of the site is to host open source projects and encourage collaboration on them. Project Kenai is built on Ruby on Rails, and uses Subversion and Mercurial version-control systems. How will this compete with similar sites?