Re: Betr.: Re: Rename strange/unexpected behavior.

Hi Jan,

Thanks for your feedback.

Unfortunately you appear to be misinformed on quite a few issues.

1. People were not leaving the community - rather joining.  

Before we removed the zero-dollar downloads we had record numbers of
downloads and installations of the software every day.  These people
were not engaging in the community and not contributing towards
development and crucially - when they experienced problems did not get
help but tended to spread misinformation.  

We have a much more active community now that we've removed the
zero-dollar downloads, because everyone who purchases CVSNT is actively
engaged and getting support and advice about how to use it and resolve
problems.

2. Mr. Stallmans great idea

I believe that you are misrepresenting the purpose of Free Software into
something incredibly myopic.  The source code is not supplied so you can
build if the author disappears - the source code is supplied so you have
a bunch of freedoms: the freedom to improve the software, the freedom to
make the software more beneficial to your business, the freedom to
contribute to a community. 

3. Access to source code 

We are obliged under the GPL to provide source code at the time of
distribution.  When we supplied you with CVSNT 2.5.04 you could also
download the sources right then and there.  If you purchase CVS Suite
you can download the GPL/LGPL sources too.

4. Development assistance/ repository

The private repository used by our dev team has multiple mirrors and is
available 24 hours / 7 days (except for occasional systems maintenance).


We provided the CVSNT-DEV newsgroup and commit access to a public
repository for years and years and helped many people get CVSNT
development environments up and running, however almost never got any
patches/commits back to the repository.  Just before we closed it down
people were quite frank that they wanted to get CVSNT development up and
running purely to avoid contributing - this was evil and so we stopped
it.

Very few of our customers are interested in building from source - but
the few who are we provide all the assistance they need, including
repository access.

5. Contributing to SVN (or CVS)

Tony looked at the SVN code and tried to get involved in the SVN
community in the very early days - just as he also tried to be involved
in the CVS community.  These communities all have some 'policy' by which
they accept code contributions.  Adding windows specific support (case
insensitive filename support, windows authentication) and support for
other SCCM processes (reserved versioning, server side enforcable rules,
audit) are not generally accepted by these communities - it's why CVSNT
needed to fork in the first place.  

It is not possible to 'fork' SVN in the same way as Tony forked CVS - if
you modify the code then the SVN license precludes you from using the
name 'Subversion' in any way.

I've never seen any cost/benefit analysis that shows any organisation
getting value out of SVN that they cannot get from CVSNT.  This is
probably because the original SVN developers were not trying to improve
on CVS at all (see article "Dispelling Subversion FUD" by Ben
Collins-Sussman).  

So we couldn't contribute to SVN to improve it, the SVN project had no
intention of providing any significant SCCM improvement over CVS and we
couldn't fork it.

We also looked at Git and other similar tools, but we've always been
focussed on SCCM for commercial software developers - and all software
development managers we talked to said they didn't want distributed
copies of their intellectual property - the repository - so whilst Git
may be productive, it's going to be a long time before commercial IT
departments legal teams allow it.

Tony and I did identify a bunch of things that would create real value -
and we designed and delivered CVSNT 3.x specifically to deliver on
those:
* SQL relational database backend
* true open client - SVN, CVS, TeamSystem or WEB clients
* support for multi-site branches 
  (eg: 'dev-2' branch in Bangalore and 'dev-1' in Norwich)
* version a wide range of different artifacts
* support a wide range of business processes

I believe just like Tony was years ahead of the curve in the early
2000's when he created CVSNT 1.10, EVS (CVSNT 3.x) is years ahead of the
curve today, and I'm happy to wait to let the market catch up.

6. multi-vendor open source

This is a great ideal - but I do not know of ANY multi-vendor open
source project.  MySQL is provided by Oracle (and previously by Sun and
previously by MySQL AB).  Different forks of linux are provided by
different linux vendors - but these are not the same software.  CentOS
and RedHat are an example - but to the best of my knowledge the majority
(99.9%) of the work is done by RedHat - so if RedHat disappeared I don't
think you'd be seeing another CentOS release ever - so it's not really
multi-vendor either.  Postgres -- one vendor.  Mozilla -- one vendor.

7. what really helps is...

The point of the Free Software Foundations advice is that the best way
to ensure that open source software is continually developed is to
support the vendor financially.  The onus is equally on us the vendor to
tell you the consumer how much we need you to pay to ensure development;
and on you the consumer to pay what the vendor is asking.  Prior to July
2010 we were unclear on what we required from you - now we are clear.  I
do regret that we were not as clear about this in 2005 - we could have
achieved so much more.

The Free Software Foundation have my best interests in mind: if March
Hare stop creating free software, and Oracle stop creating free software
and Red Hat stop creating free software because we've all gone broke -
it's really not in the Free Software foundations best interest.  So I
give more weight to FSF's advice, which is what we've followed.

I encourage everyone to join the very active CVSNT community - stop
being outsiders: purchase CVS Suite for all your staff.

Regards,



Arthur Barrett
Product Manager

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