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wgj
With choice of version control so important for any project, how can they be so light on details about what theirs is or how it compares to the very strong competitors already out there?
dlsspy
The benefits of having software on Joel should be self-evident.
DannoHung
Obviously FogBugz did it themselves because they are the most highly documented sufferers of NIH syndrome.
DenisM
They are? I know they used VNC for their remote help thingie. What's the charge?
btn
Writing their own language/compiler surprised a lot of people:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html

zaphar
Why? It worked. It solved a problem they had. And they are successful as a business. It's only surprising if you think their problem was a non-issue. Sometimes NIH just means your doing something no-one else has a solution for.

Google gets accused of NIH quite a bit too but when your serving billions of requests per second you find issues with libraries, frameworks and services that no one else sees. It's not NIH when you are solving a problem no one has solved or at least solved and made publicly available.

mahmud
Big Soft is the most highly documented. Sun, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft .. those guys do it all in-house. Fogcreek is Joe Nobody in terms of software; they're like a CGI extra from LotR trying to walk the red carpet at Cannes.

They are not even close to "highly documented"; someday they will get there, but not today.

look_lookatme
Agreed. That part of the pitch is pretty off-putting. I'd wager to guess it's just subversion, but who knows?
kylec
It's Mercurial, but it is a bit odd that's not mentioned anywhere on the site. The only thing I can think of is that maybe they're planning on having it work with other VCSs?
timdorr
I was able to figure it out with this image: http://fogcreek.com/Kiln/i/en-US/LearnMore/StartReviewsEffor...

Although, I got confused when I saw this one: http://fogcreek.com/Kiln/i/en-US/LearnMore/ReviewEverything_...

Still, not even a mention of the OSS project that you're basing your product on? Way to spit in the face of the massive coding effort you're using for free...

gecko
We're not trying to hide it; trust me. In fact, we consider using Mercurial a really big selling point. We're just still working on clarifying the website.
timdorr
Ok, I see that you made some tweaks, which is helpful. I understand that you don't have ill will, but it's important to play fair.

Also, so you don't get in a heap of trouble later, make sure you're posting source code if you're distributing it, as it's GPLv2.

gecko
Merely calling Mercurial does not mean we have to license our whole product under the GPL. Modifications we make to Mercurial will of course be shipped.
timdorr
No, I know. I only meant Mercurial itself, not the whole set of tools you've built on top of it.
kamens
The answer is Mercurial -- we'll be making the website much more straightforward as we flesh out its content very soon.
psranga
Hosted source control for closed-source projects? I am intrigued by this idea. I would have thought this would be a small market.
emullet
github (you can pay for a private account), unfuddle, I'm sure I'm missing at least another major one.
zzygan
assembla is the other bigger one. Very slick too
InclinedPlane
It's not just hosted source control, that's a minor element, it's code review and bug tracking integration. There actually isn't much competition in this market, yet, and this is a big and growing market, so it's a pretty smart business move.
jasonr
Sorry for the confusion! The updated homepage has been pushed. That should clear up a bunch of questions, but feel free to yell if you are still unclear about stuff. By yell, I mean tweet @kilnfc or hop on over to http://kiln.stackexchange.com and ask.