Martin Fowler, a well known expert in OO, modeling, design patterns, methodologies and everything software engineering, published a great article on recent innovations in Version Control. He discusses Centralized and Distributed approaches, plus Subversion, Git and Mercurial (and some alternative products) from a very pragmatic aspect. His thoughts are perfectly in synch with what we experience on a daily basis, and what we saw while talking to our clients. Recommended reading.
Another partly related resource has been published by ThoughtWorks, the company Martin works for. The scope of their Technology Radar Jan 2010 goes far beyond VCS, it is a study of all emerging technologies and trends in IT. Absolutely recommended.
Finally, let me mention that our flagship product, codeBeamer, and its free brother, codeBeamer Managed Repositories are developed along the same ideas: they will not enforce you to make the final decision between Subversion, Git and Mercurial. As Martin points out, each of those three has their own virtues and each of them fit particularly well to certain business situations.
Instead, codeBeamer supports Subversion AND Git AND Mercurial. Even better, it enables you to choose a different VCS for each of your projects. Sounds too good to be true?
