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Why Commercial SCM Tools Are Better Than Open-Source Tools

By Damon Poole

December 15, 2005 — (Page 1 of 3)
Your organization has a core competency that has a direct bearing on your competitive advantage. The more of your time you can spend leveraging your core competency—whether it is financial transactions, network protocols or something else—the more you can enhance your competitive advantage. Therefore, it makes sense to delegate as much unrelated work as possible.

Delegation can come in many forms, such as third-party libraries, outsourced development and automation. When considering what to delegate, many organizations overlook a huge opportunity—software configuration management (SCM).

According to the analyst firm Ovum, most professional developers are still using homegrown SCM tools. Homegrown tools are either built entirely from scratch or more commonly built atop one of the free version-control tools such as CVS or Subversion.

Unlike major open-source projects such as Linux, which receives corporate support in the form of salaried engineers from such companies as IBM and Red Hat, open-source SCM projects receive very little corporate sponsorship. As a result, features and innovation in the open-source SCM tools lag far behind the commercial SCM tools.

Some of the major features that are available only in the commercial tools are refactoring (rename operations that preserve history and merge operations), issue-based change packages, tight integration with issue tracking, stream-based development, caching, replication, full support for mixed Unix and Windows environments, and process workflow. In addition to these examples, there are literally hundreds of smaller features that are available only in the commercial tools.

CVS, introduced in 1986 and now the most popular open-source SCM tool, is missing not only the features above, but also some of the more basic features, such as atomic transactions, fast branching, rename tracking and merge tracking.

In 2000, a group of open-source developers (with the help of a commercial sponsor, CollabNet), set out to address this deficit by creating a tool from scratch, called Subversion. Their goals and road map do not include the more advanced capabilities listed earlier. In the five years since inception, they have accomplished only the first two of their four goals, atomic transactions and fast branching. It comes as no surprise that rename tracking and merge tracking are still missing from Subversion, as those are both difficult SCM problems that are typically either part of the original architecture or never implemented (as is the case with CVS).

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Why do IT shops have so many SCM tools?
Being accustomed with different SCM tools and differing SCM requirements are two of the reasons why IT shops have a diverse collection of SCM tools Read More...

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