Source Code Repositories

In ye olden days of yore, source code repositories were either CVS (Code Verification Store) or SVN (Subversion). Both were horrible at everything: usability, collaboration, stability, merging, committing, branching. Literally everything it was supposed to do. Then along came new technology that did it all properly: Git and Mercurial. Git has officially taken off throughout the world after everyone and their dog has realised how much it works amazingly well. I've used it a lot, and I'm more than happy with it. Git is open source and free, but again like anything, private repos would need to be paid-for hosted or self-hosted. Off-site hosting would be the best, that way you don't have to worry about the cost, time and effort of physical hardware or its administration. 

The most common Git hosted options are: 

GitHub 

GitHub is the world's most popular hosted Git site. It is for a reason: works really well, has a great browser interface and offers an in-built wiki to explain the source code, and issues to track, organizations, user groups, profiles, etc. There is unlimited free allowance for public open-source repositories, so it's great for the scientific community. The main downside is that it's expensive for private use. You're looking at $25/month for a maximum of 10 private repositories (libraries). Eek. 

BitBucket 

BitBucket is the next most popular Git site. Much less so than GitHub, but it's still quite popular. Why? It works just as well as GitHub, but you can create an unlimited number of both public and private repositories. There is a free allowance for up to 5 users on a single private repository. After 5, then you have to pay. On the plus side, if you have an academic email address, if you add it to your BitBucket account (not even as your primary email address) then you automatically get upgraded to the academic features for unlimited everything (not for private Groups though, that should be implemented at the institute-level). This is a perk Atlassian offer in order to encourage, attract and benefit students and faculty. So that's right, BitBucket is made by good ol' Atlassian so it has its own issue tracker, wiki and integrates with the rest of the Atlassian world, i.e. JIRA and Confluence. 

BitBucket can be self-hosted, again with a $10 one-off payment for 10 users. 

CodeCommit 

AWS's Git offering is CodeCommit. Someone else wrote up his review and I couldn't put it better myself: 

Although I’m a fan of CodeCommits simplicity and automation support there are a few negatives to consider before migrating everything to it. There is a cost, albeit a small one, to using it. You’re charged by number of users accessing your repos and the number of git operations. I’m assuming I’m not going to hit the operations limit often but I will immediately be paying for an extra user or two. I’ll have my own AWS CodeCommit user for normal read/write repo access and I’ll need additional, locked down, users for my CI services. Access control is handled using IAM, this is both a positive and a negative depending on how much you like the JSON based policy language. There’s currently no concept of a public CodeCommit repo so you can’t start a code base off in private and then promote it to public view as you can with GitHub or BitBucket. The dashboard UI lacks the familiar collaboration features, there’s no pull requests, issue tracking or wiki built in. If you’re working in a team you’ll need a separate way to handle those. These current limitations means GitHub doesn’t need to be worried just yet, the lack of collaboration features alone will prevent most people from considering CodeCommit as an option even for private only repos. 

From <http://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/aws-codecommit-initial-thoughts/>  

Basically, it's just not worth it in a world where you have BitBucket and GitHub.