GotDotNet Workspaces: My Silly Proposal
Preamble: The GDN workspaces have been improving. What they're trying to do is not trivial. A lot of things are out of their control.
Okay that's out of the way. My question is this: why even do GDN Workspaces Source Control as a ground-up effort. Why reinvent the wheel, why veer off into already covered space? Why not go to Eric Sink and SourceGear and do that mambo that only partners-in-good-standing do, and set up GDN Workspaces Source Control -- powered by Vault?
Pros:
- GDN Workspaces are more robust and feature rich out of the box.
- SourceGear gets solid grassroots exposure, a massive petri dish for Vault testing and evolution and secretly indoctrinates hundreds of active developers into the cult of better-than-VSS source control.
- Community project developers spend less unpaid time hassling with trying to manage source control among loosely allied groups of contributors.
Cons:
- GDN Workspaces provides that kind of test environment for Microsoft itself, theoretically it could be used to do under-the-radar nextgen stuff for a complete rewrite of VSS. I have no real reason for believing this is the case other than that it could be used to do that.
- SourceGear sells no direct licenses as a result of this ponzi scheme; opportunity cost is roughly zero, however, as there really aren't any licensing budgets among the community projects.
- Developers don't learn to appreciate the extensive features and reliability of things like Vault or Perforce that they use at work (by way of comparison).
All that said, it's just a random thought really. GDN Workspaces have gone from zero to sixty quite fast and--when everything works right--they really are pretty sweet and no other tool developer is putting anything comparable out there. That said, I'd rather be going a hundred more of the time, but I'm greedy that way.