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Open-source, subversion, mono, and gcc

I read a blog entry about a subject dear to my heart: migrating from cvs to svn. I know svn isn't perfect, but it's just so much better than cvs that it's no contest. If you have objections to svn that are even just a few months old, they have probably already been fixed. One of the first things I did at my new job was to perform the migration and everyone (well... all one other developer who was hired before I was and is still there) thinks it was a great move.

But I digress. Sort of.

Reading said blog, I thought, "Ha, cool! Those Mono guys whined about svn blame being slow, but then those manly GCC guys dug in and fixed the problem instead of whining some more!" What a poster-perfect picture for the virtues of open-source, huh?

Except, while looking for more details, it turns out that the developer responsible for the fix, Daniel Berlin, was a svn developer from way back. As well as (possibly more recently) gcc. (Does this guy ever sleep?)

So it's a little less heroic than it initially appeared, but still, not something you'd see in the closed-source world. "Hey, Microsoft: that bug in Excel, the one you weren't going to get to for a while? My buddy used to work on the Excel team. Mind letting him fix it for me?" Right.

If anyone knows a more complete/accurate summary of what happened here, my curiosity is piqued. The best I could find is from early in the process and not very detailed.

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