Betr.: Re: Rename strange/unexpected behavior.

 "Arthur Barrett" <arthur.barrett-qn/[email protected]> schreef op 25/01/2011 
01:22:10:

> Dries,
> 
> This problem does not occur in the more recent CVSNT 2.8 that is a 
> part of CVS Suite, download the trial to check and if you have any 
> problems just drop our pre-sales technical support team a note.
> 
> Failsafe Audit, User defined commits, genuine rename, auto merge etc
> - are all features CVSNT has had for years and SVN still does not 
> have (the SVN 'rename' command does a 'delete' and 'add' behind the 
> scenes - just trace the protocol to check, but yes the server does 
> track them just like CVSNT).
> 
> Free Software is not about price - and many Free Software projects 
> are now following the Free Software Foundations recent advice to 
> charge for Free Software so that those who create Free Software can 
> continue to afford to create Free Software: 
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html 
> 
> People who keep switching software systems for whatever is zero-
> dollar incur significant costs (see "the valuation of IT assets" 
> published in The Financial Times UK Edition 36,501 on Monday October
> 1 2007) and encourage software developers to ditch the GPL/Free and 
> Open Source Software model in exchange for gratis ('lite' editions 
> of) proprietary software.
> 
> We released CVSNT 3.x over two years ago - which is a single server 
> with an SQL backed repository and allows SVN, CVS/CVSNT, Web and 
> TeamSystem clients - showing what real openness looks like (a single
> server and your choice of client), but the response has been 
> underwhelming - I hope to do a new release of this in the next 12 
> months and a big marketing push in 2012.

That may all be true, but the strength of free software is not only it's 
freedom, it's also the community behind it. If a product is developed as 
proprietary software and something goes wrong with that company, the 
customer is out of luck. Free software (as defined by Mr. Stallman) has 
the great advantage that if something goes wrong with the company you 
still have the source and you can maintain it yourself, together with all 
the other users. But that assumes that you and/or the other users are 
capable of doing so.
The reality is that most of the community left CVS/CVSNT years ago for 
other systems. What little was left of it was largely 'killed' when 
closing down the CVSNT mailing list and making it hard to obtain 
unrestricted binaries, moreover, if anyone were to decide they wanted to 
contributed they are almost forced to first fork if they want any 
guarantee to have access to the source repository tomorrow: The public CVS 
server for source code is not guarenteed to be available 24x7, is provided 
by a volunteer and may be withdrawn at any time.
If tomorrow something goes wrong with Mach-hare, or Mach-hare management 
decides to go into a completely different direction than what we want, who 
says we will be able to get our server up and running on the next version 
of our operating system? I simply consider it a risk to invest in CVSNT 
today, making that same investment in a system that actually has both 
community support and _several_ commercial companies that provide both 
development and support services for it just makes more sense to me. We 
are very well aware that changing systems comes with a cost, and regulary 
changing would be a big mistake, but right now I actually believe that the 
cost of sticking with CVSNT may well turn out to be an expensive mistake 
as well. 
I find that very sad, but I can't risk ignoring it.
 
ps.: Not that I truly expect you to listen, but my advice for mach-hare 
would be to join in on development of another system (svn would be the 
obvious choice), add the few missing features to it that CVSNT has (you 
forgot to mention ACL's ;-)) and create a rock-solid conversion utility 
(you could make that utility available only against a fee if you do so 
desire) and continue their excellent support services for that. It would 
allow customers to choose Mach-hare without risking a de-facto vendor 
lock-in.

Kind Regards,

JAN KEIRSE
ICT-DEPARTMENT
Software quality & Systems: Software Engineer

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