Commercial versus Community support at Subversion

Hello SVN development community,

Yesterday, a sales person from a company which I will not name here
sent us an email message that I will quote, below.

There's nothing wrong with companies selling the services of
contributors. However, this email message claims that the 'only' way
that an issue is going to get addressed is by paying them $25K for a
support contract.

If there were true, and I don't believe it for a moment, it would be a
serious community problem from an ASF standpoint. Since I don't
believe it's true, on the other hand, I'm sending this along in the
hopes that you will take the opportunity to clarify to the user
community that the Subversion development community is not a captive
of any particular commercial organization.

I would be happy to provide the entire message to the PMC.

Best Regards,

Benson Margulies
Member, ASF

Quote from email:

I'd think the point here is that your "only" practical route to
getting a fix for the first issue would be a support contract with us.
Whilst we can't make guarantees about specific functionality or
solutions, bug buddy would give you direct access to a committer who
would raise the profile of the bug internally and champion a solution.

We could ask the committers to comment on the issue they are seeing
with svndiff and let us know their initial thoughts before a support
contract is signed, provided that we had a reasonable commitment in
the first place.
Received on 2010-12-23 14:25:29 CET