[this announcement is available online at https://s.apache.org/ApacheSVN20 ]
Community-led Version Control Software and Source Code Management Tool
Available on Most Integration Servers, Integrated Development Environments,
Issue Tracking Systems, and more.
Wakefield, MA —27 February 2020— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the
all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source
projects and initiatives, announced today the 20th Anniversary of Apache®
Subversion®, the popular centralized software version control system.
Apache Subversion ("SVN") allows users to commit code, manage changes, and
recover previous versions of all sorts of data across files and directories.
Subversion is ideal for distributed teams who need to easily audit and act on
modification logs and versioning history across projects. Subversion originated
at CollabNet in 2000 as an effort to create an Open Source version-control
system similar to the then-standard CVS (Concurrent Versions System) but with
additional features and functionality. Subversion was submitted to the Apache
Incubator In November 2009, and became an Apache Top-Level Project in February
2010.
"We are very proud of Subversion's long history, and remain committed to our
mission statement," said Stefan Sperling, Vice President of Apache Subversion.
"Subversion has moved well beyond its initial goal of creating a compelling
replacement for CVS. In 2010 our mission statement was updated to
‘Enterprise-class centralized version control for the masses’.”
Over its 20-year history, Subversion has grown to become the most popular
version control system on the market, and remains the leading centralized
versioning and revision control software today. Millions of users worldwide
depend on the collaboration-friendly system to easily access all files and
historical data simultaneously without code conflicts or corruption. Subversion
accommodates a wide variety of integrated development environments (IDEs), and
is well-suited for large projects.
Apache Subversion has been broadly adopted for mission-critical code
distribution and collaboration workflow by Adobe Dreamweaver, Eclipse, Google,
Halliburton, Microsoft Visual Studio, Python, Ruby, Skype, SourceForge, and
WordPress, among many organizations and development communities. The ASF uses
Apache Subversion in its own infrastructure, housing millions of lines of code
in more than 1.8 Million commits across 300 Apache Top-Level Projects and
sub-projects.
"One of the best decisions of my life was emailing up Karl (Fogel) to see if he
was interested in moving the Open Source community beyond CVS," said Brian
Behlendorf, co-founder of CollabNet and co-founder of The Apache Software
Foundation. "Essential to Subversion's success was the core team of Karl, Ben
(Collins-Sussman), and Mike (Pilato) working publicly, spending the difficult
time on design docs and helping newbies up the learning curve, with the goal of
building as a community what three people (even the best) alone could not do.
20 years later I'm not surprised to see it continuing to innovate, to add
features, to fix bugs, and to push the envelope forward. Git still needs
competition :) But it's also the best example, and essential example, for why
community matters more than code. It's the Subversion community that made it
successful, that made the code continuously better, that left no CVS user
behind, and that did so with the technical precision and super-human decency
all other projects should aspire to."
"Twenty years later, Subversion is no longer the upstart -- it is mature
software, and still going strong," said Karl Fogel, original founding developer
of Subversion, and Partner at Open Tech Strategies. "Subversion continues to be
widely used, especially in enterprise settings, because of its reliability, the
simplicity of its conceptual model, its ability to handle large files, and
features like path-based access control and optional file-locking. In
situations where Subversion's centralized model is the right tool for the job,
it really shines: we use it for our entire internal corporate tree, for
example, because the path-based authorization is crucial. To get some other
viewpoints on where Subversion has come over 20 years, I took a walk through
the main project's support forums and the forums of TortoiseSVN, the popular
open source SVN client application for Windows. I was delighted by what I saw:
a diversity of uses and users, fast and helpful responses, and a focus on
practical needs. Starting two decades ago, Subversion helped bring version
control beyond developers to a wider audience, and it continues to do that
today."
"Today we've got a plethora of fast, reliable, and efficient version control
systems, but twenty years ago we had exactly zero: CVS was the only widely used
version control system and it still failed in unpredictable ways (including
bitrot that was undetectable until you tried to check out old code)," said
Brian Fitzpatrick, one of Subversion’s earlier developers. "Even though most
people use Git today in the Open Source world, Subversion was the catalyst that
allowed folks to move from CVS to Git and so many other modern day version
control systems. While the core team wrote a great deal of Subversion's code,
we also spent a great deal of time communicating outside of our office in
Chicago in an effort to build a larger Subversion community--an effort that
eventually paid off more than tenfold."
"When we gathered in my basement in early 2000, thinking about what paths
Subversion should follow, none of us imagined what would be accomplished over
the next twenty years," said Greg Stein, an early developer of Subversion, and
former Vice President of Apache Subversion. "We focused on improving the
experience of CVS users and administrators. We overshot our own expectations
within just a few years, creating a system that millions have found worthy.
From our humble beginnings, I couldn't be more proud of what the community has
accomplished."
"Technology is at its best when it brings people together," said Matt
Mullenweg, Founder and Lead Developer at the WordPress Foundation. "SVN has
brought countless people together over the years and I wish it much continued
success."
"Reliable and powerful version management is essential for our product
development. Today, more than 100 of our employees regularly use Apache
Subversion with several million lines of source code in our Subversion
repository," said Roland Wagner, Head of Product Marketing at CODESYS Group.
"Our success with Subversion convinced us to become the first company to
develop a connected product for the area of industrial automation with the
launch of CODESYS SVN. Many of the over 100,000 CODESYS users worldwide work
with CODESYS SVN which significantly simplifies the development of their
industrial IEC 61131-3 application software, when realizing automation projects
for factories and plants, mobile machines, buildings and energy systems. We
thank and congratulate the Subversion community on its 20th anniversary!"
"After 20 years, Apache Subversion continues to deliver on our goal with a
stable and portable version control system that powers software projects of all
sizes being developed on any of the popular operating system platforms," added
Sperling. "Apache Subversion repositories store valuable mission-critical
assets of companies and organizations across the globe. Subversion remains an
essential source code management tool for developers at every level --we
welcome their participation on our lists and community."
Availability and Oversight
Apache Subversion software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is
overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A
Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations,
including community development and product releases. For downloads,
documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Subversion, visit
http://subversion.apache.org/
About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, The Apache Software Foundation is the world’s largest Open
Source foundation, stewarding 200M+ lines of code and providing more than $20B+
worth of software to the public at 100% no cost. The ASF’s all-volunteer
community grew from 21 original founders overseeing the Apache HTTP Server to
765 individual Members and 206 Project Management Committees who successfully
lead 350+ Apache projects and initiatives in collaboration with 7,200
Committers through the ASF’s meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way".
Apache software is integral to nearly every end user computing device, from
laptops to tablets to mobile devices across enterprises and mission-critical
applications. Apache projects power most of the Internet, manage exabytes of
data, execute teraflops of operations, and store billions of objects in
virtually every industry. The commercially-friendly and permissive Apache
License v2 has become an industry standard within the Open Source world,
helping launch billion dollar corporations and benefiting countless users
worldwide. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) not-for-profit charitable organization
funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Alibaba
Cloud Computing, Anonymous, ARM, Baidu, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One,
CarGurus, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Handshake, Huawei, IBM,
Indeed, Inspur, Leaseweb, Microsoft, ODPi, Pineapple Fund, Pivotal, Private
Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, Tencent, Union Investment, Workday, and
Verizon Media. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and
https://twitter.com/TheASF
© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Subversion", "Apache Subversion",
and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software
Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and
trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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