Version Control: A Case Study in the Challenges and Opportunities for Open Source Software Development

The growth of the worldwide open source development effort, driven in part by the recent entrance of large corporations into the open source arena, offers new opportunities to improve the software engineering tools available for that effort. Indeed, the increasing difficulty of managing large open source projects, as well as that of integrating related efforts into new programming environments, represents a challenge that must be met if the rapid growth of open source software is to continue. This position paper addresses these issues in the context of software version control.