Re: I want initial revision to be 2.1, not 1.1

Hi Louis,

I'm the product manager for CVSNT at March Hare Software.

> I noticed that CVSNT...   you must now pay a distribution fee 
> to obtain the Community Edition of CVSNT.

As you can see from your experience from investigating revision 2.1 and
learning about TAG's - there is a lot more to good change management and
more to using CVSNT than downloading the software and running it.
Hopefully you and your management will also see that there were costs
involved in learning this.

The primary reason we stopped providing 'zero dollar' downloads is that
we found it led people to use the software badly.  All this is explained
very clearly on the web site (see: 'the problem').
http://evscm.org/modules/Downloads/

Your example is a perfect one to illulstrate our point.  If your
management invested a very little cash on purchasing CVSNT 2.8.01 (CVS
Suite 2009) then you would have had the documentation to realise that
CVSNT has great inbuilt tools for release management and project
evolution far far beyond version numbers and tagging.  Having paid for
this information early would have saved you money - not costed you
money.

Free software is worth paying for.  We have invested over a million
dollars in cash in CVSNT (programmer wages, computers, rents, etc.) to
develop it from 2.0.51 to 2.8.01 (including 2.5.03 and 2.5.05 and EVS
3.1.01) and are about to release 2.8.02.  As a company we pay for the
free software we use or make donations if the provider only supports
that model.  Paying for free software is the only way to ensure that in
the future there is free software.  Over 95% of CVS Suite 2009 is 'free'
(by the GNU definition which has nothing to do with price) - and we'd
like it if we could make it 100% free but some companies have raised
certain problems with that - the easiest solution for now is the one we
have.

Please take the Free Software Foundation's advice: pay for free
software, and realize that free software is more valuable than non-free
software.  Your company is happy to pay for non-free software (windows)
- if free software is more valuable, then they should be more willing to
pay for it than they are for non-free software.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

I'm glad to hear you've found a way to solve your immediate problem with
CVSNT 2.5.05 - but I'd prefer to hear you are thriving using all the
features and resources of CVSNT 2.8.

Regards,


Arthur Barrett












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