[4][5] BitKeeper was originally developed by BitMover Inc., a privately held company from Los Gatos, California owned by Larry McVoy, who had previously designed TeamWare.

[9][10] BitMover used to provide access to the system for certain open-source or free-software projects, one of which was the source code of the Linux kernel.

Being able to see metadata and compare past versions is one of the core features of all version-control systems, but was not available to anyone without a commercial BitKeeper license, significantly inconveniencing most Linux kernel developers.

Commercial users were also required not to produce any competing tools: In October 2005, McVoy contacted a customer using commercially licensed BitKeeper, demanding that an employee of the customer stop contributing to the Mercurial project, a GPL source management tool.

Bryan O'Sullivan, the employee, responded, "To avoid any possible perception of conflict, I have volunteered to Larry that as long as I continue to use the commercial version of BitKeeper, I will not contribute to the development of Mercurial.