What's the best free open source alternative to MS Team Foundation Server? [closed]

Question

I have a team developing software in MS Visual Studio and now they want to start using MS Team Foundation Server, mainly for versioning and maybe patch and bug tracking. They don't have any experience with MS Team Foundation Server, but they are very enthusiastic with MS products. So whats the best free open source alternative solution? Git, SVN, CVS, Bugzilla, plugins, etc.

Answer 1

There isn't a direct alternative, but I'd rather use the following:

Subversion (TortoiseSVN), CruiseControl, and something like Bugzilla.

Martin Fowler has recently done a good article on source control, and svn comes out ahead of TFS.

Answer 2

There's no single open source alternative to TFS. TFS does source code management and versionning, build server and continuous integration, workitems, project management, sharepoint portal, ... and a good Visual Studio integration.

Answer 3

Here's a vote for Mercurial (Hg), along with Bugzilla. If you are primarily a Microsoft shop then Mercurial has a much better UI (TortoiseHg), which we use with WinMerge to show visual diffs. We don't find Visual Studio integration to be a big factor in practice, and it's great to be able to operate source control on whole folder trees regardless of the VS solutions and projects contained within them.

Also, if you are planning on a new VCS now, you may as well keep up-to-date and use a DVCS, like Mercurial or git. No one I know who has switched to a DVCS would ever willingly go back to a non-DVCS like TFS or svn. Once you get used to local check-ins you'll agree!