Sure it would. If the project is suffering from what you state, then how could it help to not fix it?

Honestly I used subversion for a very long time! However after using it for a long period of time and having to deal with supporting servers that didn’t update their repositories to include subversion versions newer than 1.1…I switched mainly to mercurial. If subversion had improved at a quicker pace and had equivalent capabilities as mercurial then I may have stayed with it. One thing that I doubt will change that I really enjoy with mercurial is it’s distributed nature. I doubt that subversion will head in that direction though.

Agree that you’ll look into doing it, agree with the rest of the core team that your design and approach is a good one and then deliver the code. No-one is going to argue about that, and it doesn’t require any number of press releases (though you can happily say how you’re enhancing/contributing all you like *after* you’ve done that).

So, ladies and gentlegeeks, please follow the “About WANdisco” link towards the top of the sidebar, scroll down to the products section and learn that Subversion does indeed form the core of their offerings.

As for end users being on your side, that really makes no difference, it’d be different if you had developers on your side. However, any developer reply I have seen has been critical of your press releases to say the least. To put it another way, people love TVs, and they like big, cheap TVs with a sharp picture. But the users of the TV rarely know the requirements to build, design or develop such a TV. So if you say you’re going to make TVs that are sharper, bigger and cheaper than any others, of course you’ll receive enthusiasm. The sad fact is however, that most end users never have and never will participate in the development process. So their support is essentially hallow, as are your press releases.

Lastly the wording you chose in the press releases were divisive to those in the development community and intentionally misleading to those who are unfamiliar with the internals of the project (end users).

You did a great discredit to your company and to the open source community as a whole.

No, it’s obvious. When you offer more features and complain about the developers the end users will like the features and the developers will get offended.

“For me to substantiate this would require washing dirty laundry in public and that would help nothing”

Then what was the purpose of the original statement? Making claims you will not back up does not leave a good impression of you.

Come on, do it. Otherwise, it just seems as if you are making things up.

And just out of curiosity, who, more specifically, is counting commit stats anyway?