Evaluating subversion for an enterprise installation

Greetings,

I am part of a technical assessment team at my company that is looking
at replacing our current version control software. After much arm
twisting, I was able to get subversion on the assessment list.

Good news: subversion is now one of the final contenders.

Bad news: it is still an up hill battle. I'm up against an entrenched
mentality of "if it's free it can't be any good" and a committee that is
75% management/25% users. So far, it appears that the top management is
pushing an expensive glitzy piece that is technically sound and has a
lot of potential.

The questions I will need to answer (so far) are:

1. Licensing - Subversion's license is clear, and I have identified and
located the licenses for apr/, expat-lite/, and neon/. Are there any
other licenses that I need to be aware of?

2. Customer service - it is a novel idea to some folks that there can be
superior customer service without a company to back the product.
Instead of getting a help desk operator with canned scripts that don't
ever quite work, you get knowledgable users and even the application
programmers.

2a. What is the average turnaround time between submitting a problem to
the mailing list and the first response?

2b. Is the mailing list monitored by the active developers?

2c. On average, how often are maintenance releases issued?

3. Security -

3a. There is a mindset issue I need to address. Specifically, I need to
demonstrate that having open source code does not make the product less
secure. Has anyone addressed this before? Are there some good
references and/or case studies?

3b. Are there specific security issues that are known (other than those
addressed in the book) that we need to be aware of?

4. Operating systems ... are the server side pieces Windows 2003 SP1
compliant, and are the client side pieces Windows XP SP2 compliant?

Thanks in advance,

David Johnson

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Fri Dec 2 04:51:19 2005