Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Maintainership, and whiners...

[Bruce Stephens]

Andrew Suffield <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> Put bluntly, I think that the heavy politicalisation of the revision
> control field, with widespread territorialism and a few financial
> heavyweights trying to achieve market dominance, is too hostile an
> environment to support practical free software development. The
> antics of companies like Canonical, BitMover and Tigris have
> effectively nuked the field and it will take years before the
> radiation decays enough to support life.

Really?  I don't know why Stellation (which used to be in the Eclipse
family of projects) died (or appears to have), but it wouldn't
surprise me if they felt too much pressure from subversion.  (Not that
the two were intended to be similar, but maybe people lost interest as
it became clear that subversion would be good enough at what it was
intended to do.)

There seems to me to be enough interesting work in darcs, codeville,
monotone, and (maybe) mercurial.  Maybe svk, too.  I think it's
reasonable to assume that subversion has won the centralised RC race,
but I'm not at all sure about the distributed space; I guess it's
possible that Canonical will strip all the best ideas from the various
choices and dominate, or maybe it'll sponsor enough good documentation
or tool support or something and wipe out the rest, but I don't think
that's clear yet.

(I'm sure most systems will die out.  There's just too many of them.
Almost all, I think, since Tom released larch---before that I can't
remember more than a handful of possibles.  Anyone want to trust their
source code to <http://freshmeat.net/projects/php_vm/>?)

[...]