We have a stated goal of all free software projects using this system. Read our message about licensing for more information.

This is not free software, you have to pay for it one way or another. Here are the details:

• Single user licenses are free
• you can chose to pay in privacy instead of money
• you do get source
• you can hack it and redistribute it as long as it passes the regression tests

See this article at Linux Weekly News for a good write up of the issues.

The summary is that BitKeeper has a formalized change log mechanism and if you are willing to have that change log be publicly available on the web, you can use the product without a fee. Note that BitKeeper does not display your source code as part of the log.

BitKeeper/Pro is the commercial version and the only difference is that the public logging is disabled by default and that you may choose to have the information logged on an internal, private machine.