On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 08:01:56AM -0500, Benson Margulies wrote: > Hello SVN development community, > > Yesterday, a sales person from a company which I will not name here > sent us an email message that I will quote, below. > > There's nothing wrong with companies selling the services of > contributors. However, this email message claims that the 'only' way > that an issue is going to get addressed is by paying them $25K for a > support contract. > > If there were true, and I don't believe it for a moment, it would be a > serious community problem from an ASF standpoint. Since I don't > believe it's true, on the other hand, I'm sending this along in the > hopes that you will take the opportunity to clarify to the user > community that the Subversion development community is not a captive > of any particular commercial organization. > > I would be happy to provide the entire message to the PMC.
It is true that some companies (collabnet, elego, wandisco, possibly others) offering consulting and support services around Subversion have Subversion committers on staff. Of course, these companies will try to get their own developers to tackle bugs of interest to their customers with high priority. However, any information about such bugs is communicated via standard channels the community provides. For instance, Subversion developers sometimes file an issue based on an internal customer bug report, with customer-specific data removed or replaced. The process followed from there on is the standard community-driven process, so the resulting fixes are vetted by the community just like any other bugfix. This is in the best interest of customers, because they will receive the bugfix in an officially blessed Subversion release. It is also in the best interest of the community because bugs found within companies who can afford to pay for support contracts get fixed for everyone. And the fixes are made with the consent of the community. However, it also means that fixes may not be made in the way envisioned by a customer, in case the community disagrees with what the customer wants. In which case the customer may still have the option of getting a custom Subversion distribution with a custom fix from the company, maintained without community involvement. While this option exists as a fallback, it has so far never been demanded by any customer of the company I work for (elego). In all cases so far, customers were happy with the resolution obtained via community involvement. There is a strong desire within elego to keep working with the community in this way. I'd expect other companies to have a similar desire, so the message you are quoting surprises me. It sounds like your sales contact is trying to prevent you from relying on the community for bug fixing in order to close a deal. Your option of relying on the community is being downplayed as impractical, while in reality the community does not discriminate against users who have not bought a support contract. There has in fact been a long history of community-driven bugfixes in the Subversion project, made by developers on company payrolls as well as independent developers. If you'd like some evidence, I could dig up log entries and related email threads of community-driven bugfixes I have made myself. Just let me know. BTW, have you tried bringing up the technical problem you are facing on the users@ list? Regards, Stefan
