Apache Subversion To WANdisco, Inc: Get Real

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."

Comments

Open!

[nhaines]

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:Open!

[Hognoxious]

the interested observer can investigate and come to the real conclusion on his own

Meanwhile, the other 99.99% will listen to whoever shouts loudest - just like they do with everything else.

Smell test

[antifoidulus]

If you take any organization called "WANdisco" seriously, you have bigger issues than where exactly your open source software came from :P

Re:Smell test

[PatPending]

If you take any organization called "WANdisco" seriously, you have bigger issues than where exactly your open source software came from :P

Yeah, they really should have choosen a more professional name, such as WANdiscotheque.

Re:Smell test

[PatPending]

This just in: due to negative publicity surrounding his comments, WANdisco CEO David Richards has announced plans to rename the company WANkers.

Re:Smell test

[PatPending]

Why don't you quit your Jive Talkin'?

WANdisco is simply focusing on Stayin' Alive in these difficult times.

So instead of making snide remarks, You Should Be Dancing in their Boogie Shoes!

And--did you ever think of this?--maybe their CEO Dave Richards has Night Fever from working in a Disco Inferno!

So if you're More Than a Woman, I ask: How Deep is Your Love for open source?

Now, my friend, is the time to step down from your Manhattan Skyline and spend a Night on Disco Mountain before you have a Calypso Breakdown!

(And maybe savor A Fifth of Beethoven while you're at it.)

And I do apologize for my ranting--I blame a relapse from Saturday Night Fever

Re:Smell test

[MadTinfoilHatter]

This just in: due to negative publicity surrounding his comments, WANdisco CEO David Richards has announced plans to rename the company WANkers.

I recently had to assist implementing this software, and trust me, your suggestion would be a much more appropriate name. WANdisco is a horribly expensive solution to a problem that can be solved in much better and cheaper ways (the most obvious one being using something better than SVN in the first place). WANdisco essentially tries to do is turn the turd that is SVN into the turd that is ClearCase. Bleh!

Re:Smell test

[jbatista]

I notice the post was labelled as "Funny", but really -- I can't imagine how much fun you have with company names such as "Google" or (even worse) "MICRO SOFT" (I suppose you'd choose to do business instead with a company called "MAJOR HARD").

Re:Smell test

[Lumpy]

And their flagship product....... SPROKETS!

Now is the time on Sprokets when we dance!

Re:Smell test

[Aldenissin]

Well then, we should be upset that they took the idea of wacky sounding names and made them look bad. I mean just when they were starting to get credibility, like GNU, Linux, KDE, GIMP, someone has to spoil the goldmine in names that WANdisco should have been! I mean really, WAN (haha get it, it's like a LAN, but bigger) and then disco(par-tae!)! I'm on the Internet, bopping along! /only trying to be half funny.

Loose cannon PR Agency stirs the pot

[joeflies]

in order to get noticed. News at 11:00

Subversion development _is_ slow

[prionic6]

While I have much respect for the Apache Foundation and do not know this WANdisco guys, anyone has to admit that subversion is lagging behind in core functionality. 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. We try to avoid branches in our projects right now because it is so unwieldy. Merge tracking changed a few things but is not really sufficient if you refactor your package structure. This is a really important feature that is on the roadmap since, I don't know, five years? 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.

Of course, it easy to criticise an Open Source project when you are not contributing anything. But I would very much appreciate any effort that goes into speeding up the implementation of this stuff.

Re:Subversion development _is_ slow

[PatPending]

I respectfully suggest you read the second link in The Fine Summary. All Will Be Revealed (TM).

Re:Subversion development _is_ slow

[butlerm]

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:Subversion development _is_ slow

[prionic6]

Yeah, I read that. And I get it. Subversion is a rock of a software. Yet still, I remember reading about rename tracking _years_ ago identified as a critical feature by the subversion developers themselves! And now it is on the roadmap for Q1 2012! At that pace, I don't know if maybe moving to another SCM may be the better option.

Re:Subversion development _is_ slow

[prionic6]

Tortoise is usable by about anyone in our company (at least the lowly windows using creatures). What I have heard and seen about gitk and git-gui, they are a bit "complicated" ;)

Re:Subversion development _is_ slow

[yahwotqa]

Nah, they're just going to develop it in a separate branch, and merge it to trunk when it's done.

Re:Subversion development _is_ slow

[LizardKing]

At work we switched from Subversion to Mercurial last year, after repeated difficulties merging branches back into the trunk with SVN. The "killer feature" of SVN over CVS was supposed to be the ability to move files and directories around without doing it by hand in the repository itself. However, the moment you start doing this in a branched repository - or worse still, delete files and directories - you're into a world of hurt. The guy who wrote the existing branch/merge support has acknowledged it's inadequate[1], while the remaining SVN developers have been promising to fix it in the next version, for about the last four or five major versions. Since switching to Mercurial, we have had a reasonably large branch that was reintegrated into trunk with none of the problems we had with SVN. We've found the tools at least as good as those available for SVN, with various team members using the Mercurial command line client, NetBeans plugin and TortoiseHg.

Re:Subversion development _is_ slow

[ka9dgx]

... 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 for a while now, and it seems to be complete. Is it just that I'm a Mercurial Noob?

Re:Subversion development _is_ slow

[gbjbaanb]

The ultimate issue is that renames (or moves) are implemented as delete+addition operations. Maybe back in the day, that appeared to be ok, but now its obvious it's a large failing. That's the reason you have problems with merging - merging is fine for changes to existing files, its merging new files where you get the problem. (look up 'tree conflicts' in svn for more info).

The rest of the system works well (though there's still a lot of svn haters for the usual reasons - they have something 'new' or 'cool', they just hate it because its mature and established, they hate it because they last tried it when it was version 1.2 and still think its has those limited features), and there is excellent tooling.

Git and mercurial lose some features that enterprises like, spare checkouts for example is a killer feature for enterprises that don't work well with DVCSs simply because of their original design.

BTW, I like the svn branching system, I've used a lot of scms in my time and svn is the only one that really shows you all the branches easily laid out for you to view - no stupid layers of branch views over the core code. You do have to manage it a little then, and there are features in svn like being able to branch at any point that I think might be worthless - always branch at the root and have done with any sub-directory complexity.

At the moment, the current push for implementation is the next-gen working copy which should be easier on Windows virus checkers and faster. I would hope the tree-conflict merge issue be tackled next.

Re:Subversion development _is_ slow

[gbjbaanb]

oops - typo. "Sparse checkout". You can checkout a partial directory structure, update and commit as required.

So if you have a 12Gb source tree stored in your repo, you don't need to get it all out - only the parts you want to work on. Typically you checkout the root item only, then update the required directories to fetch them into your local drive as you need them.

Re:Subversion development _is_ slow

[stsp]

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.

Speaking as a Subversion committer: Yes, you're right, it will still take a long time. It's very hard to make it work with a few small changes because the system contains quite a lot of layers of abstractions. We need to peel at each layer to make this work.

Each layer has a public API with some amount of compatibility guarantees. Which is both a blessing and a burden. It's a blessing for people who want to write tooling around Subversion, because they know that the tools they've written against Subversion at, say, version 1.0, will still work, without recompilation, with any subsequent 1.x release. This allowed a lot of third party tools of decent quality to be developed. No need for parsing command line output to interface with the version control tool (as was the case with CVS and AFAIK is still, today, with git). But it's a burden because it means we have to be careful not to break existing interfaces when making changes.

I wasn't around when the API compatibility guidelines were set up, and my life would be easier if they weren't there now. But the project is committed to keep them. Trying to fix things anyway is quite a challenge. It's very, very hard, and has to happen in lots of small steps, spread out over several release cycles. But it's a lot of fun, too.

We're currently rewriting the lowest layer on the client side, the working copy library. This will eventually allow us to do things like tracking local renames, so that tree conflicts involving a local rename will be solved more or less automatically. There will eventually also be improvements in other layers, e.g. client/server interface, and eventually the repository itself. Then we can start propagating rename information from the server to the client to close the loop and also handle non-local renames properly. When? Dunno. When it's done. It will take longer than many would like in any case.

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.

I don't see how forking would magically help with bringing about the desired changes any faster. You might just as well try to write a new and perfect centralized version control system from scratch. Or join the few people who are still actively committed to bringing Subversion forward and help us out. Subversion has already solved an awful lot of problems any centralized version control tool has to deal with. The glass is half-full when you look at it that way.

WANdisco's side

[FrootLoops]

Here's WANdisco's press release, their CEO's first blog post, and his second blog post responding to community response.

Re:WANdisco's side

[ralphart]

I love his summation in the second blog post:

...Could these things have been said with a little less venom? Yes, probably. But the bottom line is that WE CARE because we have a deep vested interest in this Subversion stuff.

Translation: I'm a dickhead but that's okay because I'm awesome!

....Getting out of marketing and into IT was the best career move I ever made.

Ben Collins-Sussman blog post

[FrootLoops]

[Note: The summary's second link seems to be getting slashdotted, so I'm copying its contents to a comment here. The words are not my own.]

This entry was posted by Ben Collins-Sussman on Monday, 3 January, 2011

Author’s Note: These opinions are my own. I'm one of the original folks that started the Subversion project, but no longer work on it. These thoughts do not reflect the official position of either the Subversion project or the Apache Software Foundation, which are located here on the ASF blog.

Subversion has reached the realm of Mature software — it’s yesterday’s technology, not cool or hip to work on anymore. It moves slowly. It is developed almost entirely by engineers working for corporations that need it or sell support for it. Alpha-geeks consider software like this “dead”, but the fact is that something like half of all corporate programmers use Subversion as their SCM (depending on which surveys you read.) This is a huge userbase; it may not be sexy, but it’s entrenched and here for the long haul.

Subversion isn’t unique in this position. It sits alongside other mature software such as Apache HTTPD or the GCC toolchain, which are famous projects that are similarly developed by corporate interests. There’s a tricky line to walk: none of these corporations “own” these projects. They understand that they’re acting as part of a consortium. Each interest sends representatives to the open source project, contributes code, and allows their engineers to participate in the full consensus-based evolution of the software. IBM, Apple, Google, and numerous other companies have figured out how to do this correctly:

• 1. Let your engineers know what’s important to work on.
• 2. Let them participate individually in the community process as usual.
• 3. Profit. 98% of the time the corporations eventually get the features they want.

Today, however, we have a great counterexample of how not to participate in an open source project. Subversion was initially funded and developed by CollabNet; today at least two other companies — Elego and WANdisco — are employing numerous engineers to improve Subversion, and are just as vested in selling support and derivative products. CollabNet and Elego continue to function normally in the community, but WANdisco recently seems to have lost its marbles. Last week, they put out a press release and a CEO blogpost making some crazy statements.

It’s clear that the WANdisco CEO — David Richards — is frustrated at the slow pace at which Subversion is improving. But the two posts are simply making outrageous claims, either directly or via insinuation. David seems to believe that a cabal is preventing Subversion from advancing, and that “debate” is the evil instrument being used to block progress. He believes users are crying for the product to be improved, that the Subversion developers are ignoring them, and his company is now going to ride in on a white horse to save the project. By commanding engineers to Just Fix things, he’ll “protect the future”of Subversion, “overhauling” Subversion into a “radical new” product.

Is this guy for real? It sounds like someone read my friend Karl's book and created a farce of “everything you’re not supposed to do” when participating in corporate open source.

Even weirder, he’s accusing developers of trying game statistics by creating lots of

Re:Ben Collins-Sussman blog post

[horza]

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.

Re:Ben Collins-Sussman blog post

[makomk]

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?

Apparently, he did exactly the same thing a year ago and failed to follow through. Unfortunately, this seems to have completely failed to either catch up with him or stop him from dragging the Apache Foundation's name through the mud for PR gains.

Re:red?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since nobody has given you a straight answer:

Stories get red backgrounds behind the title, rather than green, when it's in the mode where it gets shown to subscribers (the people who actually pay /. money) earlier than the rest of us.

For a short period right after it becomes generally visible, they also appear to be red - I assume there's a caching problem or something along those lines.

Just ignore it; it's not special.

Re:Slashdot

[silanea]

I remember reading about an analysis of Facebook comments and "like's" a while ago which concluded that negative posts receive the most attention. Apparently it is easier to respond to a negative attitude - either by arguing against it or expressing solidarity - than a positive one.

The same effect is visible in politics: It is the angry voters who rush to the polling stations, the content stay at home, even though the outcome of the election is equally important to both. There surely is a psychological explanation for this behaviour.