Updated SCM Manifesto

A few years back, I wrote a first SCM Manifesto. It is not that I have changed my mind, nor that there would have been significant progress in the directions I value, but I feel I can offer a reword:

I believe there is a window of opportunity for a radical step forward in SCM, with a ubiquitous need for end user collaborative management of information. In this respect, software development is only a pilot domain. SCM should be part of products, so that upgrades would happen under management, and propagate piecemeal. Similar support for multiple versions of the same components may already be found, in a primitive way, in Eclipse for instance. Ultimately, the goal could be to get rid of the producer/consumer paradigm altogether.

Such a change is likely to happen, because it is needed. Without it, the Open Source challenge will definitively have been missed. It may be that this won't happen under the name of SCM though, since this community may have lost its credibility and ability to develop. The Eclipse case may be a symptom. Of course, a great deal of experience would be lost, and have to be reinvented again.

-- MarcGirod - 28 Jun 2008