Open Source SCM

The words forming the title are the result of multiple collisions (of semantically rich traditions), and hide a few interesting paradoxes.

One relates to the on-going discussion on the distinction between the meaning of CM and SCM (Noting that Open Source is a sub-category of Software).

An other collision results from the historical burst of Open Source as a successor/replacement for Open Standards. This is maybe more controversial, however, I daresay that the era of standardization has more or less failed, and produced as its antithesis, Open Source. The reason for the failure is an SCM related one: standardization, relying upon freezing (avoidance of change) was inadequate for the need of our times. Open Source is thus meant to offer some kind of living standard.

The next collision results from the next dialectic: this which produced Open Source as an antithesis to Free Software. The terms here are misleading, because accidental. What was kept stable in this transition is -unfortunately in my opinion- the focus on source, which was already there in the previous phase, as a legal concern in a biased historical context. I don't develop here and now (but would agree with Richard Stallman). The concern is legitimate and the war (for the freedom of creation) still on-going.

Where this focus has gone wrong, is in producing the rampant idea that the issue of an Open Source SCM would relate to having an Open Source SCM tool, and thus dictate to use CVS or subversion, at least as a precondition. I am happy to admit that some other arguments are often presented in defense for some design decisions of subversion, among which the necessity to cope with massive collaboration. This is a discussion for an other page hierarchy.

The obvious reflexion jeopardized there concerns the meaning of Open. Light is most easily brought on this issue by thinking about what might on the contrary close some software, make it impossible in practice to fix or enhance. I believe that beyond (but in fact already much more than) Intellectual Property (licensing for short...) issues, lack of manageability, chaos, and its correlate: excess of control (bureaucracy, short-sightedness, inertia), are the main enemies. In other words, that making software open is more an SCM than a legal issue. And that it concerns running software (executable, testable, experimentable), not sources.

-- MarcGirod - 28 Oct 2006