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Apache Software Foundation tells WANdisco how it’s done.

Apache Subversion [1]   Apache Software Foundation [2]

Thought I’d start off the New Year with a genuine rant:

A company whose programmers participate in Apache Subversion [1] development has apparently decided it is somehow steering the whole project. Don’t ask me where WANdisco, Inc [3] got this idea: they’ve been part of Subversion development for nearly two years now — they hired some people who were already Subversion committers, and to be fair, have supported some great work. But so do plenty of other companies (CollabNet [4], Elego [5], and Google [6], to name a few), and all of those other companies have managed to abide by the consensus-based, community-governed process that Subversion has always had (and that was re-formalized when Subversion joined the Apache Software Foundation in 2009).

The ASF has finally posted a response [2] to WANdisco’s recent statements. More entertainingly — perhaps because he’s not constrained by the ASF’s need to take the high road — my friend Ben Collins-Sussman, who is one of Subversion’s founding developers, has posted a rather more acid analysis of WANdisco’s behavior: “WANdisco, ur doin it rong” [7].

Yikes. Happy 2011 :-).

Update: InfoWorld’s Paul Krill has now written about it [8] (it’s a good summary, and both the facts and the quotes are accurate).

Update: And now Slashdot [9].