Available CVS Alternatives
Note about Relevance
As of 2018, this site has become mostly irrelevant.
Aegis
A complete Software Configuration Management system by Peter Miller licensed under the GPL. Is distributed, very feature rich, and is designed for use by large projects and large teams.
Arch
A revision control architecture originally developed by Tom Lord that is distributed, and can be networked and serviced by a large number of common networking protocols (without a special configuration of the server). Has several open-source implementations.
Bazaar
Bazaar is an open-source decentralized and distributed version control system, released under the GNU GPL.
BitKeeper
A proprietary revision control system by BitMover Inc. that used to be available for free software developers under a gratis license. There are many strings attached to it, so read on.
Darcs
An open source version control system written in Haskell. Distributed, easy to set up and serve, supports renames, and incorporates the author’s "Theory of Patches".
Git
A distributed version control created by Linus Torvalds (also known as the originator and chief maintainer of the Linux kernel) after the demise of the BitKeeper for open-source projects. Distributed, fast, but may exhibit some counter-intuitive behaviours.
Mercurial
Mercurial (also known as hg) is a distributed version control system written in Python, that aims to combine the best aspects of Git and Subversion, and so be fast and easy to use.
Monotone
A capable version control system with a different philosophy, and strong reliance on strong cryptography.
Perforce
Perforce (sometimes referred to as P4) is a commercial version control system, which is very fast, robust, portable and also quite powerful. It requires a per-developer yearly licensing, but a gratis license is also available for open source developers.
Subversion
A revision control system that was designed and programmed from the ground's up to be modular and scalable, yet resembling CVS a bit in nature. Not as feature-rich as BitKeeper yet, but fully open-source.
Vesta
A software configuration management system originally designed by Digital Corp. Now distributed under the LGPL. Replaces both Make and CVS, and so can only be built with itself for the time being.