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

A company whose programmers participate in Apache Subversion development has apparently decided it is somehow steering the whole project. Don’t ask me where WANdisco, Inc 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, Elego, and Google, 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 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”.

Yikes. Happy 2011 :-).

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

Update: And now Slashdot.