In accordance with the Free Software Foundations advice you must now pay a distribution fee to obtain the Community Edition of CVSNT. CVS Suite is less expensive, has over 400 fixes, is 95% open source and includes the High Performance Server.
Since 2004 we've taken CVSNT from a tool that only a dedicated hobbyist would rely on to the version control engine that the largest retail and investment banks, pharmaceutical companies, retailers, manufacturers, universities and government departments rely on every day to manage change. After six years and seven major releases we are providing 100% of the development and documentation resources.
We have listened to our customers and are making some significant changes. You have told us that you want better documentation, stability, responsiveness, performance and support, so we are.
Today
Software Change and Configuration Management benefits enormously through the use of Free Software because having the rights to change the source code allows better customisation to your business processes than mere scripting. CVSNT has grown from a simple port of CVS to compete feature for feature with proprietary SCCM tools, while still offering that ability to customise the software to your specific needs. CVSNT supports Failsafe Audit, File and Branch level Access Control, Change sets (both multi-commit/user-defined and auto commit), Native (password-free) windows authentication, Merge Tracking with Auto Merge and many other features no other open source SCCM does.
The problem
For six years we have supplied two copies of CVSNT: a Community Edition designed for people who are actively developing CVSNT (for zero dollars), and a Professional Suite edition designed for people who want to run the software only (for a very modest fee). Yet every day companies contact us struggling with serious issues in the community edition that are easily solved in CVS Suite.
The Free Software Foundation's advice.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) have a vested interest in ensuring that companies like ours succeed because we create Free Software by investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into programmer hours, computers and office space. So we turned to them for advice, and they recommend that we charge a distribution fee for all downloads.
The solution*
We announce today that we have decided to take the FSF advice and remove all downloads from the web site - the source code and installers for the 'community software' are now available to purchase from the online store alongside CVS Suite.
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| CVS Suite Trial | 30 days to try with pre-sales support plus over 400 fixes and high performance server | FREE DOWNLOAD |
| CVS Suite | £85 per person |
| CVS Suite x64 | for HPUX, Solaris Sparc and SuSE Intel | £170 per person |
| CVS Suite Annual Software Maintenance and E-mail and Telephone Support plans, starting from £17 per copy/year |
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| CVSNT Community | no support or warranty, no email support,
no newsgroup, no mailing list. 100% Free Software. | £426 per version |
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Thank you
We look forward to you purchasing one of our products in the near future. We strongly recommend CVS Suite as the industry leading SCCM tool for commercial software development on any cost/benefit comparison.
Sincerely,
The March Hare CVSNT Team:
Arthur Barrett
Tony Hoyle
Glen Starrett
Udo Pott
Carles Zaragoza
Wednesday June 30th, 2010
Note *: we will continue to supply 'client only' installers (with advertising) to other F&OSS projects by private distribution channels which they are able to redistribute under the terms of the GPL.
The public CVS server for source code is not guarenteed to be available 24x7, is provided by a volunteer and may be withdrawn at any time:
cvs -d :pserver:cvs:@cvs.cvsnt.org:/cvsnt co -r CVSNT_2_0_x cvsnt
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