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.

As we've written before, the use of the Subversion source code management system is slowly declining in the open source community, as new alternative git gains ever more attention. But that doesn't mean the Subversion folks have given up - far from it. In fact, they recently released version 1.5, chock-full of new features on both client and server.

Version control systems seem to run in waves in the open source world. For many years, the venerable CVS had the lion's share of usage. Then along came Subversion, with the announced goal of being "a compelling replacement for CVS." Subversion has gained enough popularity to be the baked-in choice in many tracking and management tools. Lately, though, I've been seeing more and more interest in git - the system used to track changes to the Linux kernel itself, among many other things.