🚀 go-pugleaf

It's not obvious there is a good answer for anyone looking for
a good, reliable and reasonable cost version control system.

At one point, the folks who make PVCS asked me if I'd do a product
swap for my Hamilton C shell.  In the business, it's considered
kind of rude to refuse these requests unless they're completely
outrageous (like wanting to trade your shareware game for a $3,000
CAD system) and anyway, I'd been thinking I really was overdue to
get organized with a version control system.

So naturally, I did the trade and did intend to use it.  But I
quickly gave up and said the hell the with it for two reasons:
first, they have these crazy serial numbers embedded into the
thing because they're so damn worried about piracy.  Well, so are
we all, but the moment you get more worried about defeating the
pirates than about giving your paying customers a good product,
I think you've missed the whole point.  And that's the way I
felt about the PVCS system.  It was just obnoxiously implemented.

Second, I don't think I'd had it more than a few weeks before I
already began getting "update" offers, each one priced in the
hundreds of dollars.  Here again, I do know that my policy of
giving away updates free is extreme to say the least, so I don't
really expect that of other vendors, but it did seem to me that
the PVCS folks are a whole lot faster to stick their hands out
for some mighty greedy upgrade fees than I thought seemly.

Frankly, the overall impression I got was that this was a vendor
a whole lot more concerned about lining their pockets than about
ensuring their customers got satisfied.  That doesn't make them
unique, sadly, but still, I think it sucks.

If I were really seriously looking for a version control system
at this point, I think the one I'd be looking at right now is
the one MS has released.  (Is that the Sourcesafe product?  I
forget the name.)  The big thing that strikes me is that while
we can all find things to gripe about with MS, on the whole,
they do treat their customers pretty well and that goes a long,
long way with me.

Regards,
Doug Hamilton  KD1UJ  hamilton@bix.com  Ph 508-440-8307  FAX 508-440-8308
Hamilton Laboratories, 21 Shadow Oak Drive, Sudbury, MA  01776-3165, USA