Git has become the most popular version-tracking platform around for open-source projects. Whether you're using GitHub, Gitorious, Bitbucket or similar, or even if you're hosting the git repository yourself, accessing the code is something us Linux users take for granted. For Windows users, what seems commonplace to us (typing git clone on the command line, for instance) is completely foreign to the regular point-and-click world they're used to.

Enter TortoiseGit. With a familiar GUI interface to the underlying git system, TortoiseGit can make Windows-based open-source developers feel right at home. It's open source itself, and it's part of the Tortoise family, which includes TortoiseSVN for Subversion repositories and TortoiseCVS for the Concurrent Versioning System. To check out the whole family of Windows-based Tortoise clients, see the Wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TortoiseGit.