[cvsnt] March-Hare message into my commit messages

[Arthur Barrett]

Thanks all on your feedback about the advertising in the commit messages.

I have created a new FAQ to make it clearer how to disable this:
http://www.march-hare.com/cvspro/faq/faq2.asp#30

Let me also take this opportunity to clear up some issues raised in this 
thread:

1) we are no longer satified with the open source model.

Free Open Source Software is a very valuable commodity and allows developers 
to customise code (and learn from looking at well developed mature code) so 
that they can implement optimal software based systems.  That model of 
software development is important and satisfying to both Tony Hoyle and 
myself and is unaffected by a few lines that add annoying behaviour.  Mark 
D. Baushke (one of the original CVS developers from 20 odd years ago) 
pointed out recently on the gnu.cvs.help newsgroup that in his opinion CVS 
should ALWAYS be built from source by the person installing it.  If you are 
building from source when you install then removing a line or two is pretty 
easy.

2) I bought one copy of Suite to support the project.

Those people such as Jan Keirse who supported March Hare Software by 
purchasing one or more CVS Suite licenses can use the CVS Suite code which 
does NOT include the advertising and is much more stable and includes 
features such as changeset/bug from message.  In fact Jan Keirse can use the 
one copy purchased for as many users desired provided that the commercial 
components like Workspace Manager, Bugzilla/Mantis/Jira Integration etc are 
only used by a single named user (and they don't expect us to answer 100 
users worth of questions for the price of 1 license).  Furthermore we have 
also donated copies of CVS Suite to our more regular contributors (though if 
you are a 'regular contributor' who as done so in the past 12 months then we 
probably have not caught up with you yet).

3) WinCVS and TortoiseCVS do not support the -M notation

The 'combined client' installer includes our own TortoiseCVS and WinCVS 
builds and these *should* both use the -M workaround, but currently do not, 
I intend to fix that next week.

4) We are annoying users

The advertising message has been carefully designed so that the majority of 
the people who will be annoyed by it are those who we hoped to annoy: those 
who have not contributed to the Free Open Source software development (in 
code, support, documentation or testing) - or put it another way - those who 
download the MSI and never contact us again.

5) Annoying users wont help make sales

I personally would have very much preferred to avoid having to take such an 
overt advertising measure as adding advertising to the commit message, 
however the thread titled 'Help the CVSNT Project' between me and Luigi D. 
Sandon made it very clear to me that organisations who use CVSNT as the 
cornerstone of their software configuration management process are choosing 
to spend on 'non-core' tools (such as GUIs) when these tools are irrelevant 
without the Verstion Control engine.  E.g.: if Luigi D. Sandon now chooses 
to switch the versioning engine to Subversion then those client tools are 
irrelevant.

6) EVS

Since Tony has spent a large part of his personal time as well as his 
professional time writing EVS he and I would like to see open source CVSNT 
users begin to migrate to EVS if possible, and I may even change the 
advertising so it does not insert when using EVS Server from CVSNT client so 
there is another reason to switch.  EVS allows developers to use Subversion 
or CVS/CVSNT clients and will hopefully combat the misinformation out there 
about CVS vs CVSNT vs SVN.  If you use only the 'CVSNT' side of EVS then it 
is all open source (though we are not currently providing an MSI for that), 
and if you are a developer who wants to write a Version Control system then 
the EVSAPI is open source, but if you just want to download and run the .EXE 
it is NOT open source.

7) In conclusion....

We have many commercial-only customers who are unnaffected by the 
advertising, and have been the ones paying for the development of CVSNT for 
4 years.  I am convinced that the 1.4 million people who only download the 
Free Open Source CVSNT every year can afford to pay a little towards its 
future development, and if a good percentage do we could afford to remove 
the advertising again in just a few weeks.    I will review how well the 
advertising is working and determine any changes over the next month or so 
(such as Clóvis Garcia Marcondes's suggestion to have the client -m work 
like -M).


Regards,


Arthur Barrett