Apache Subversion To WANdisco, Inc: Get Real 85
kfogel writes "The Apache Subversion project has just had to remind one of its corporate contributors about the rules of the road. WANdisco, Inc was putting out some very odd press releases and blog posts, implying (among other things) that their company was in some sort of steering position in the open source project. Oops — that's not the Apache Way. The Apache Software Foundation has reminded them of how things work. Meanwhile, one of the founding developers of Subversion, Ben Collins-Sussman, has posted a considerably more caustic take on WANdisco's behavior."
Open! (Score:5, Insightful)
The beautiful thing, though, is that because development discussion is held in open, publicly archived mailing lists and all development is done in logged, publicly accessible source code repositories, the interested observer can investigate and come to the real conclusion on his own to see whether either party's explanation makes sense.
Re:Subversion development _is_ slow (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't mean distributed repositories, but the one feature pack that the other systems seemingly have right: branching and merging with real rename tracking
It is entirely possible that this will never happen in any reasonable time frame without re-engineering the whole system. If it can happen with relatively minor changes, it should have happened by now. If it is going to require major changes, somebody is essentially going to have to fork it and redo the core SCM storage from the ground up. A number of minor patches won't do. A version of the Innovator's Dilemma, more or less.
Re:Open! (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, the other 99.99% will listen to whoever shouts loudest - just like they do with everything else.
Re:Subversion development _is_ slow (Score:4, Insightful)
... On the other hand, git and mercurial just don't have the tooling (GUI) that subversion has with TortoiseSVN, SmartSVN, the Eclipse SVN Handler... There might be equivalents, but they are not as good.
I've used TortoiseHg [bitbucket.org] for a while now, and it seems to be complete. Is it just that I'm a Mercurial Noob?
Re:WANdisco's side (Score:5, Insightful)
I love his summation in the second blog post:
Translation: I'm a dickhead but that's okay because I'm awesome!
Re:Ben Collins-Sussman blog post (Score:5, Insightful)
Ridiculously over the top. The ASF response was fair enough, in a United Nations kind of way, but trying to tear David Richards apart on a probably over the top PR piece is just as counter-productive.
The guy has stuck his head over the parapet and claims he will implement the features users most want. The rest of the community is scoffing at him saying it can't be done in the time he is projecting. Why not sit back and let him go ahead? Either he will fail in which case the PR piece will come back to haunt him, or he is going to give a massive boost to the Subversion project. Either way it's a win win for those like Ben Collins-Sussman disbelieving of his claims but use Subversion.
Why get dragged into petty politics, rather than saying "Let's see you put your money where your mouth is, I look forward to seeing monthly progress reports on the dev mailing list"? Get the guy to commit cash for code, rather than try and pick a playground fight.
Phillip.