The most serious flaw in CVS, IMO, and the most important feature to address in any new system, is CVS's total lack of understanding of directories. If you ever want to change the structure of your CVS controlled source tree, you either have to:
fake out CVS by doing a remove/add pair on every file you want to move (which means you lose the revision history of each such file!), or
manually move files around in the repository (which entirely defeats the purpose of using a revision control system in the first place!)
If anyone out there creates a successor to CVS, please fix this fatal flaw!
I appreciate the availability of open source software, and have done my part to contribute to a number of open source and free software projects (Xerox PARC's ILU, MIT pthreads, UMD's Jazz, etc). Nevertheless, I am still not a true believer in open source or free software.
For me, it is a simple matter of economics, value and incentives.
I believe that the original, creative act of writing software has value.
The open source and free software finatics like to tell you that they are not opposed to making money on software, and point to a number of so-called "open source" or "free software" companies as supposed evidence that it is possible to make money writing free software. If you look closely, you will see that these so-called "open source" companies are NOT directly in the business of writing software. These companies are really in the service or tech. support or consulting business. The software they write might help them sell their consulting services or tech. support or whatever, but they are not profiting directly from the software that they write. Red Hat would not break even if their sole source of revenue was selling Red Hat Linux.
Personally, I'd love nothing more than to start a small software company. The problem is, I want to WRITE SOFTWARE, not start a services or support or CD-pressing company that does software as a side-line hobby or loss leader. However, I know of no evidence to indicate that a company can even support itself (let alone make a profit) by "selling" something that is also freely available.
Personally, I consider this situation extremely unhealthy. While many of us are motivated by more than greed or profit, software is an organic entity that requires resources to do well. Open source and free software products will always be buggy, incomplete and unreliable, because the software development efforts of "open source" companies is just a side-line or loss leader to the company's real business. What company can afford to invest in good documentation or QA or *design* for something whose sole business purpose is to act as a gimmick to sell more services? As a matter of fact, some clever companies (like Sendmail, Inc.) have figured out that needlessly complex software is a great way to make people need your support services!
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- fake out CVS by doing a remove/add pair on every file you want to move (which means you lose the revision history of each such file!), or
- manually move files around in the repository (which entirely defeats the purpose of using a revision control system in the first place!)
If anyone out there creates a successor to CVS, please fix this fatal flaw!I appreciate the availability of open source software, and have done my part to contribute to a number of open source and free software projects (Xerox PARC's ILU, MIT pthreads, UMD's Jazz, etc). Nevertheless, I am still not a true believer in open source or free software.
For me, it is a simple matter of economics, value and incentives.
I believe that the original, creative act of writing software has value.
The open source and free software finatics like to tell you that they are not opposed to making money on software, and point to a number of so-called "open source" or "free software" companies as supposed evidence that it is possible to make money writing free software. If you look closely, you will see that these so-called "open source" companies are NOT directly in the business of writing software. These companies are really in the service or tech. support or consulting business. The software they write might help them sell their consulting services or tech. support or whatever, but they are not profiting directly from the software that they write. Red Hat would not break even if their sole source of revenue was selling Red Hat Linux.
Personally, I'd love nothing more than to start a small software company. The problem is, I want to WRITE SOFTWARE, not start a services or support or CD-pressing company that does software as a side-line hobby or loss leader. However, I know of no evidence to indicate that a company can even support itself (let alone make a profit) by "selling" something that is also freely available.
Personally, I consider this situation extremely unhealthy. While many of us are motivated by more than greed or profit, software is an organic entity that requires resources to do well. Open source and free software products will always be buggy, incomplete and unreliable, because the software development efforts of "open source" companies is just a side-line or loss leader to the company's real business. What company can afford to invest in good documentation or QA or *design* for something whose sole business purpose is to act as a gimmick to sell more services? As a matter of fact, some clever companies (like Sendmail, Inc.) have figured out that needlessly complex software is a great way to make people need your support services!