Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, step right up and see the latest and greatest version control system: Bazaar, brought to you by Canonical. It slices, it dices, it makes julienne fries, and if you use it right, you won't even need a fork!

Canonical, the enterprise which brought the world the extremely popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has entered the world of version control, releasing version 1.0 of Bazaar. According to Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth, Bazaar is an "extremely intuitive, robust and flexible version control system" which works as a distributed system, rather than a centralized one like CVS or Subversion. Shuttleworth claims that the unique way Bazaar handles code makes it less likely that developers who are unable to get "buy-in with [the] old guard" will end up forking the code into an independent project.

The software — which is released under the GPL as well as a proprietary option — is written in Python, comes with twenty optional plug-ins written in the Python API, and can be setup on any webserver with FTP. The code can be downloaded from Canonical's Bazaar website.

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