On July 12th, Mark wrote:
> Brock has taken a look at their code, and he says it is the opposite. Even
> though they have core and ui plugins, the code is mixed between the two
> and it does not support things like headless operations because of this.
While I have not used Subversive, from a marketing perspective the
most compelling of their advertised features is "Interactive merge
operation, similar to merge in Eclipse CVS plug-in".
http://www.polarion.org/index.php?page=overview&project=subversive
http://www.polarion.org/index.php?page=features&project=subversive
...
> > Also of concern is the fact that subversive appears to be a company,
> > vs. a community- I haven't any type of feel for the community around
> > subversive, and don't know what it's current state is- so I could be
> > wrong, and it could be supported more by the community now, than the
> > company- always what you want in an opensource project, if you ask me
> > (just out of concern of a "single point" failure).
> >
> > I guess one of the things I'm interested in, if anyone knows (I'll goog
> > around a bit in the future), is the state of the subversive community.
Judging by a quick skim of their forums, Subversive does seem to have
begun building a small community.
> I think that they are ultimately about promoting their commercial
> Polarion service. Several years ago they acquired the
> subversion.com domain, as just one example.
I concur. The evolution of the content on polarion.com is another
prime example -- it's moved from selling Subversion hosting, to
Subversion tools bundles, to tool bundles (including Subversive) and a
small suite of proprietary software distributed application life-cycle
management tools. The last concept is a clear rip-off of an emerging
market segment pioneered by CollabNet (my employer) and a few others
<http://www.collab.net/products/enterprise_edition/index.html>, for
which numerous supporting tools have existed for decades.
Polarion is a for-profit company -- its development efforts and
community participation is understandbly driven by this business
direction.
On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Alain Pannetier wrote:
...
> This is what OSS is all about : 10 years ago, it wouldn't have
> crossed Polarion's decision makers minds that they needed to give
> away subversion to enter the market.
It didn't. In the 6 years I've been working on Subversion, I have
never seen Polarion contribute a single line of code to the project.
From day one, Subversion has been OSS, originally seeded (and still
worked on) by developers paid by CollabNet. Subversion has derived
the majority of its code from contributions by its vibrant community.
While I don't know any Polarion developers who are part of that
community, their participation and contributions would certainly be
welcome.
It's interesting that Polarion's marketing FUD has unknowingly
affected even those aware of the company's style of operation. Their
use of Subversion's name and branding on their commercial and commity
sites is certainly confusing...
> Nevertheless, on one side there's a long established vibrant
> community, on the other a noisy old-style product software house
> cladding itself in OSS outfits. Glaring fact.
It's good business sense that for-profit companies rely on OSS for
part of their software stack.
Unfortunately, to some for-profit companies this seems to mean taking
the code from an OSS project, hacking it, and rebranding it without
crediting their "inspiration".
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Received on Wed Jul 19 00:48:58 2006