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SourceGear acquires Cyclic

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the getting-more-stuff dept.

David Neto writes "SourceGear Corp., the parent of AbiSource, has acquired Cyclic. SourceGear will assure continued development of CVS. " Good news for all-SourceGear is going to be the new parent umbrella for AbiSource, trying to extend their name in the public domain.

4 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. GPL wins again... by Seth+Cohn · · Score: 3

    That's the beauty of GPL or other open source software: Someone always steps up to the plate
    and takes over.

    Try to get support for anything 5 years old from a major 'software vendor'... good luck.
    Try to get support for a GPLed program, and odds are someone will be willing and able... and it's almost never abandoned, unless something superior (and often compatible) comes along.

    Good for SourceGear aka AbiSource

    --
    Help achieve Liberty in your lifetime - join the Free State Project - http://www.freestateproject.org
  2. Good news indeed! by aedil · · Score: 3

    This is good news indeed, given that CVS is quite a nice source control system. With the past news that Cyclic was dropping support for it, and handing over support to the open source community, quite some people I spoke with did have worries about the future for CVS. While open source communities tend to work well, it is more of a problem to get an established project like CVS under new "management".

    With the still existing "fear" from many companies to bring what they consider unsupported software in-house, this may actually ensure that some doors stay open for CVS to enter the business world.

    1. Re:Good news indeed! by tgeller · · Score: 2
      I second that. Cyclic has done a great job of keeping CVS vibrant while staying true to free-software ideals. I'm glad to see Jim shepherded it into new hands rather than let it wither when it was time for him to move on to other things.

      I don't know SourceGear as well as Cyclic, but was impressed with their showing of AbiWord at the last LinuxWorld in San Jose. (An anecdote: Linus came up and started playing with it while I was in the booth, and seemed quite impressed.) Their commitment to free software is clear, and I have no worries about the future of CVS under them.

      This is a good match.

      --Tom Geller

      P.S. A version of the P.R. letter with a quote from Jim is at http://www.cyclic.com/cvs/letter_cvs.html

      --
      Tom Geller
  3. Re:CVS, why the bad rep? by rillian · · Score: 2

    Personally, I think it's wonderful. My most extensive experience with it has been in the glx project, and it's worked very well. Not being a professional programmer, it's the most sophisticated system I've every used. From talking to some of my friends, I understand it has some advantages over a lot of the commercial offerings, so we may not be missing much. :) I also use it to keep track of the data and analysis routines for my scientific work.

    That said, there are lots of problems. It's not been terribly stable in my experience. It has poor support for binary files. Administration isn't fun (or easy) and it's difficult to set up securely. It's not very smart: particularly glaring ommisions are that you can't remove directories once they're added to the source tree (!), and moving files around is a pain. The notion of "code branches" could be more powerful (and easier to use). It's not easy to perform clean backups or mirrors either, and the command line options are neither elegant nor consistent. That's my personal list so far. :)

    Basically, it's a hack on top of rcs, and it's starting to show. It could probably benifit from a complete rewrite in the next year or so, with the addition of things like a security model and support for distributed (and mirrored) repositories. bitkeeper is something like this, but not free software. prcs is another, gpl'd, attempt headed by Josh MacDonald, author of xdelta; there's no client/server for it yet, though.