Open Voice

Greg Stein

Today we are joined by Greg Stein, ASF Member, Director, and Former Chairman Subversion Co-Founder and Developer, to talk about the recent announcement that Subversion is going to become part of the portfolio of open source projects over at the Apache Foundation.

Schalk Neethling: Welcome to Open Voice Greg. We learned today that the CollabNet sponsored project Subversion has been officially added to the Apache Incubator. I am sure this comes with mixed reactions from the community but, please give some background on why this decision was made.

Greg Stein: The developer community is most-affected by this move, and they are very supportive. It was their decision, after all :-)

The user community should not see much change. Subversion releases will still be made, people will package it, and users will simply get a tool that was built from a different location. The Subversion Corporation was constructed a few years ago to hold the intellectual property for Subversion, in a vendor-neutral way. However, maintaining that corporation (a non-profit foundation, really) took time away from the developers’ efforts on Subversion itself. By moving to the Apache Software Foundation, we can remove that overhead, and let the developers concentrate on what they do best.

Schalk: I am aware that new projects being added to the Apache Foundation has to go through the Incubator process. Can you tell us more about what this process will involve for Subversion.

Greg: Yes, all projects “enter” the ASF through the Incubator. The Apache Incubator project exists to “show the ropes” for arriving projects.

Since the Subversion project was started, we have followed the Apache model for communities. There are many ASF people already working on Subversion. I fully expect Subversion to spend very little time in the Incubator since we already know what the ASF likes to see from its communities, and we’ve been running that way for years.

Schalk: Some people might feel that as the Subversion team has closely followed the principles and standards of the Apache Foundation that incubation process could have been bypassed and the project be made a top level project from the get go. What is your response to this?

Greg: We discussed this at one point, but felt that it would set a poor precedent for future projects arriving at the Foundation. Other projects might approach the ASF and state they are run like our ideal communities and would like to skip the incubation process, yet they may actually require time in the Incubator to fully learn our principles.

Schalk: With Subversion moving into Incubation, what is the effect of this on the developer community?

Greg: There will certainly an impact at the time of transition: changing servers, issue trackers, mailing lists, and other supporting services. However, there shouldn’t be any real long-term impact since we’ll continue to operate the same.

Schalk: Thank you Greg for joining me here at Open Voice. Once Subversion leaves the incubation stage, how does Apache see the future for Subversion especially in the light of other version control systems such as Git and Mercurial?

Greg: Subversion is massively popular version control tool. We don’t foresee any significant decline in its adoption. Git and Mercurial are gaining many adherents, as both have explored new areas and features in the version control space. The Subversion project is working heavily on rebuilding a key client library for our 1.7 release early next year, which will enable us to add offline commits, stashing, and other features.

I hope everyone enjoyed the interview and please feel free to add your comments and questions. Looking forward to hearing from everyone.