Just before Christmas, David Richards, CEO of WANdisco, posted an incendiary little blog that all but accused the Apache Foundation of mishandling Subversion. In this blog, Richards wrote that he and his company were unsatisfied with the velocity of Subversion within the Apache Foundation, and erroneously took credit for creating the CMS. Essentially, Richards was complaining about the lack of work on merging and branching within Subversion. From his blog, in response to the question "hasn't Apache laid out a roadmap?":
Yes they did, but that’s pretty much all that happened (and that really pisses us off.) The commit logs (code committed by developers to the project) tell the real story. We are not happy with the volume, speed or participation on the project right now. Blogging, or answering questions on user lists are important, but so is writing source code. We also believe it’s unhelpful when certain unscrupulous committers decide to commit trivial changes in large files to simply get their stats up. That behavior has no place in any open source project; it’s a bad form and wastes everyone’s valuable time. The requirements that we are committing to build, namely merging and branching, are not new. Many of these have been in the mainstream and documented since 2007. I find it more than a little annoying that, given their importance to many Subversion users; these areas have not been tackled. Yes, they are difficult. Yes, they will take time. That is why a corporation needs to step up to the plate and commit to deliver.
Obviously, this ruffed some feathers, as did Richards' use of the word "fork," though he used it to say that WANdisco was NOT forking Subversion. But still, that's not a word you bandy around lightly, even when saying you won't fork. Instead, Richards seemed to take on the role of shepherd for the Subversion project, something his team was unable to do when the project was run exclusively by Collabnet. Still, WANdisco isn't exactly a one-company steering committee for the world's most popular source code management platform. And the Apache Foundation was quick to point this out in their own rebuttal, posted earlier this week. From the <a href="https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/apache_subversion_to_wandisco_1">Apache blog</a>:
The Subversion development team is already working towards the enhancements that WANdisco inexplicably portrays ([2], [3]) as bold, controversial steps that must be pushed through in the face of (conveniently unnamed) opposition. WANdisco participates in Subversion development along with many parties, and the Subversion project has always welcomed WANdisco's contributions. However, WANdisco alleges that some entities want to impede technical enhancements; at the same time, WANdisco also implies that it is the corporate leader of the project.
Neither is true. Since WANdisco does not cite any sources for their specific claims, we cannot explain them. However, a bedrock condition of participation in Apache Subversion is that an individual contributor can have discussions, submit patches, review patches, and so forth, but that companies do not have a formal role. Instead, companies get involved by funding individuals to work on the project. WANdisco's false implication that it is in some kind of steering position in Subversion development discredits the efforts of other contributors and companies.
It should be noted that Richards has now apologized. Everyone can now go back to dancing.