The Fossil website can be found at http://www.fossil-scm.org/
Fossil is a software configuration management (SCM) system. Fossil is software that is designed to control and track the development of a software project and to record the history of the project. There are many such systems in use today. Fossil strives to distinguish itself from the others by being extremely simple to setup and operate.
Fossil uses the BSD(2) license: Fossil license page
Features include:
Fossil stores content using an enduring file format in an SQLite database so that transactions are atomic even if interrupted by a power loss or system crash. Furthermore, automatic self-checks verify that all aspects of the repository are consistent prior to each commit. In over three years of operation, no work has ever been lost after having been committed to a Fossil repository.
Setup of the bug-tracking subsystem is accomplished using a TCL-like language called TH1 .
A quickstart tutorial: Fossil Quickstart
And for people coming from CVS, there is Fossil vs CVS Commands.
MBS 27-Jan-2007 : I checked the above site, but I couldn't find any license information. I know that drh released SQLite as "public domain". Does anyone know what license is used for Fossil?
From src/main.c in the fossil code:
/* ** Copyright (c) 2006 D. Richard Hipp ** ** This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or ** modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public ** License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. ** ** This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, ** but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of ** MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU ** General Public License for more details. ** ** You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public ** License along with this library; if not, write to the ** Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, ** Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. ** ** Author contact information: ** [email protected] ** http://www.hwaci.com/drh/ ** *******************************************************************************
EMJ : BUT, as from 4th January 2010, see http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/tip/COPYRIGHT-BSD2.txt . So (in my interpretation), versions of Fossil before checkin d2bec5a1d4 are GPL, and d2bec5a1d4 and beyond are not.
bch : This is incorrect; there are multiple branches. The mainline ``trunk'' is indeed BSD, but there is a specific GPL branch as well. See: http://fossil-scm.org/index.html/brlist and http://www.methodlogic.net/BSDFossil.html
"Fossil" is also the name of the filesystem in Plan 9 4th Edition [L1 ]. This "Fossil" runs on top of Venti [L2 ] which indexes files and file fragments by their SHA-1 hash.
escargo 24 Mar 2011 - I discovered a mention of Fossil in Linux Weekly News: http://lwn.net/Articles/432759/