Hello All -
I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce myself. I have
been lurking in the open-source world for a number of years now,
and have even had the occasion to contribute some work back to
the community from time to time. As a professional software
engineer and architect, I have also had the chance to experience
software development processes and methodologies at many
different companies.
As I began to do more architecture work, I became involved in SCM
tools and methodologies. I found that the spectrum of commercial
tools range from very good to completely inadequate, with most
falling somewhere in between. Prices vary just as widely,
although in the corporate world, per-seat licensing costs are
often easily justified by the increase in productivity of the
engineering staff.
On the open-source side of things, the selection has been sparse
at best. CVS has been a workhorse, but as evidenced by this
project, it has a number of shortcomings which need to be
addressed. There are a number of SCM tools which step up to the
challenge, though it seems to me that Subversion has significant
community mindshare.
The case for an improved SCM tool for the open-source community
seems clear and has been discussed at length on many occasions.
However, I'd like to share my thoughts on how the corporate world
can benefit as well.
I appreciate that commercial SCM provides a valuable service to
corporate development environments. It is still a great option
for corporations that wish to purchase a commercially supported
product. However, the cost/benefit arguments of commercial SCM
often only apply to internal development where time savings and
productivity translate to tangible dollars.
With more companies opening up part or all of their codebases to
community developers, open-source SCM tools become more
attractive. Internal developers could still continue to use
supported cost-per-seat commercial tools, but the use of an
open-source tool for external developers makes good economic
sense.
The Subversion team has done a great job with advancing a new
standard for open-source SCM. I like the general design,
architecture, cross-platform codebase, and support tools. Most
of all, it seems to be a solid, extensible system upon which new
features can be integrated.
I would be happy to contribute code to the project to resolve
issues and add features which I think might be useful. As this
email has gotten a bit lengthy, I will list my current ideas in a
separate message.
Best Regards,
Kumaran
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Received on Sat Aug 23 01:04:25 2003