BitKeeper is a software tool for distributed revision control (configuration management, SCM, etc.) of computer source code. A distributed system, BitKeeper competes largely against other systems such as Git and Mercurial. BitKeeper is produced by BitMover Inc., a privately held company based in Campbell, California and owned by CEO Larry McVoy, who had previously designed TeamWare.
BitKeeper builds upon many of the TeamWare concepts. Its key selling point is the fact that it is a distributed version control tool, as opposed to CVS or SVN. One of the defining characteristics of any distributed version control tool is the ease with which distributed development teams can keep their own local source repositories and still work with the central repository. Its web site claims that "BitKeeper has been shown to double the pace of software development".
BitKeeper uses history files that are based on the idea of the delta tables and interleaved deltas from SCCS but the BitKeeper history files are made intentionally incompatible by using a different magic number (0x01 0x48 instead of 0x01 0x68) at the beginning.
BitKeeper is proprietary software and is normally sold or leased (as part of a support package) to medium or large corporations.
Read more about BitKeeper: History, License Concerns, Pricing Change