George — I had alluded to this, but a paid upgrade to add support for tool X to Versions is a very bad idea — those of us who don't care about other tools would not want to upgrade, and Sofa/Pico would have to worry about maintaining new SVN features, bug fixes, etc. in parallel across multiple "editions" of the app.
Since I'm not a git user, I'll admit I'm not very knowledgeable about the state of git tools for Mac, but I had heard that (in general) there has not yet been a GUI "killer app" for git — all of them have limitations and failings. IMHO, the use of GPL itself results in a web of interrelated problems: (1) no killer GUI means only command-line nerds can/will use it currently, (2) companies can't produce a paid app around it, and consequently (3) any work on a GUI app is done by the (admittedly small) subset of people who currently use git, would like to see a GUI app for working with git (already a limited subset, since they already use git just fine without a GUI), and have time to burn on creating an app that must be open-source. Unfortunately, this subset hasn't yet produced a killer app, and (IMO) is unlikely to unless a company devotes significant resources to developing such an app, with the express purpose of giving it away for free. It's clearly not impossible (CollabNet is a huge force behind Subversion, after all, but that's also a core technology, not a GUI app) but much less likely than it would be under more permissive licensing conditions. Just look how long it took for Versions to be written, despite the opportunity and obvious need. :-)
- Quinn On Jul 26, 2009, at 5:45 AM, Koen Bok wrote:
Hey Quinn and George, I would argue the economical thing is not too important once git gains some critical mass. It's still small compared to svn, and in a way the compete with Mercurial which is pretty populair too. A bigger problem would be the licensing as we can't include the Git source without open sourcing our own app due to the GPL license. There are ways around this (wrapping command line) but this generally results in a lesser quality app. - Koen On Jul 26, 5:38 am, curiousgeorge <[email protected]> wrote:Good point Quinn. I'll pose the question, how much would a person be willing to pay for having a Git App that is of the same quality of Versions? I'll pay another 39 pounds for a Git client app. Who wouldn't? I think Git support would be feature for a paid upgrade to Versions (if they wish to support both svn and git) IMHO. GitX is nice for commits and reviews...that's it. Same with GitNub (if not less). The other clients are just not....well, they are not Versions let me put it that way. Pico, Sofa....name your price for either a paid upgrade for Git support in Versions or an app dedicated for Git...I know I'll fork over the dough.
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