A note from the author...

CVSNT is the product of 4 years part time work by a myself plus a small team of volunteers who've done most of the documentation and testing. The product has grown far beyond its initial goals, and now occupies a significant proportion of my spare time, spare money and thoughts. I've enjoyed every minute of it, and learned a lot.

CVSNT started in 1999 as a simple attempt to get a CVS server running on NT. There already was a port, but it required cygwin, wasn't integrated at all and had speed issues. I had previously written a couple of source control systems, which were simple in their approach but couldn't scale nearly as well as I knew CVS could. Running a Unix system was out of the question at that time.

I never really expected anyone to use it - the web page was put up in the hope that a couple of people might download it and find it useful. However very quickly I realised that I'd inadvertently tapped into a real need for people to run CVS on Windows servers. The number of downloads increased exponentially with each version - even though, at that time, the server wasn't particularly stable and had no installer.

WinCVS support was added in February 2000. This was the start of a symbiotic relationship between the two projects that has continued to this day.

As time went on, it became necessary to add more and more patches to CVSNT to support the requests that users were asking for. The core CVS developers weren't particularly interested in folding these patches back into the main tree, as their focus was Unix. About a year into the project I reluctantly forked the codebase and CVSNT became an independent project.

With the enormous amounts of help and patience from users of the project, CVSNT is now at the point where it's a stable and featureful replacement even for CVS on Unix servers. CVSNT does everything I wished CVS would do when I started the project - and a lot more.

However, it doesn't stop there...

The next version of CVSNT will be based on a much more modular architecture. I've already done a lot of work with SQL backends - this is essential to produce a version control system ready for the 21st century. Enterprise use of CVSNT will depend on the future on features like clustering, transaction based processing and the ability to track source code changes down to the minutest detail. Directory change support, distributed development and the ability to enforce company processes are all essentiall in a modern source control system.

In short, my goal is for CVSNT to be the best most comprehensive version control system ever devised. All for an unlimited license cost of $0.00.

All of this will take time, patience, and more than a little coffee... which leads nicely on to the real reason I wrote this page.

At the moment I work in a stressful job earning a modest income - well below market rate for a Senior Developer - which a requires me to work long hours and some weekends - As I'm writing I did a 7 day week last week. This obviously has an impact on cvsnt development. To realise the dream of next generation CVSNT I'll need to spend a lot more time than I am now on the project.

What I'm really looking for now is a sponsor - Someone who can match at least 75% of my current salary, on the proviso that I get to spend most (preferably all) of my time writing cvsnt. What you get back is a cutting edge source control system, loads of publicity and the potential to make some of it back - there's a big market out there for commercial support - people are trusting source code worth millions of dollars to this product already - and there is an opportunity for a commercial version including much easier administration and setup, plus enterprise monitoring tools. The CVSNT community benefits from the work done on the core (which will remain GPL) and the sponsor gets a high profile scalable product with a ready made user-base.

If you're interested contact me on mailto:tmh@nodomain.org. My CV is at http://www.nodomain.org/Resume.doc. Thanks for reading, and we'll now return to the normal scheduled wiki...

Back to the main page