14 DAY TRIAL // Code and application developers are quite acquainted to the “SVN” term. It stands for Subversion, an open source versioning control system used for years in application development. After being quite some time in the making, CollabNet, the main developer and the primary corporate sponsor of the project, has submitted Subversion to the Apache Incubator, a project where different applications spend some time before becoming official Apache top-level projects.
"We are happy to welcome the Subversion development community to the Apache Incubator," said Justin Erenkrantz, President of The Apache Software Foundation. "Since its inception, the Subversion community has modeled itself using many of the Foundation's principles, including the Apache license, our voting structure, and building upon a diverse range of contributors. Through organizational, legal, financial, and infrastructure support, the ASF's proven framework will help the Subversion community to do what it does best: provide valuable software to millions of developers around the globe. It's a natural fit."
For industry experts, this comes to no surprise since back in 1999, some of Apache's founders went their own paths, eventually putting the knowledge base in place for Subversion in 2000.
From its initial release in 2004, Subversion has been Apache-friendly mainly because 15 core developers at Subversion were also core developers for the Apache project.
As time went by and the project gained more and more momentum in the IT world as a real solution for source code version control apart from the classical CSV, more and more implementations and native-packaging with ASF (Apache Software Foundation) projects appeared on the web.
Currently, Subversion is the top code and build management stack in many development communities around the Web, starting with PHP, Java and C-related languages. Projects like Apache Ant, Apache Maven or Apache's Tomcat servers have absolutely no difficulties performing SVN operations.
By submitting themselves to the Apache Incubator, CollabNet is hoping to rejuvenate their developer work-force and community, currently in crisis due to the lack of man power. Bill Portelli, chief executive officer, CollabNet, has revealed for the SD Times that 16 out of the top 20 Subversion developers that are working or have worked for CollabNet.
We end this article by congratulating the CollabNet management for recognizing a difficult situation in its project's development and taking all the necessary steps to ensure its survival. For sure, Apache's loyal community will embrace Subversion and enhance its features more than CollabNet could have ever done.