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

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: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.