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Hi All, In October 2008 and April 2009 I wrote blatant and unashamed sales pitches for people to support CVSNT by helping to pay programmer wages. Thank you to those who acted on my previous request however we are still short of our goal, so it's time for a reminder. We will be shortly releasing CVSNT 2.5.05 and CVS Suite 2009: * CVSNT 2.5.05 will use the latest libraries and compilers and be tested on the latest operating systems - we will continue to provide binary download packages for Windows XP/Vista/W7 and RHEL5 * CVS Suite 2009 will provide a new high performance server and we will provide evaluation copies for both the server and client for all supported platforms except iSeries As of today - when you purchase CVS Suite you now also get access to an installer for the 'free/open source' CVSNT 2.5.04 without the advertising message. If you have 50 staff using CVSNT we recommend that you purchase 50 CVS Suite licenses so you can use the quality tested commercial build - but if you have less budget then you can purchase less licenses then download and use the non-advertising CVSNT 2.5.04 build instead. We will not provide any commercial support or commercial documentation for CVSNT 2.5.04. March Hare Software have been financially supporting the open source project for over 5 years and provided many features to the core CVSNT software whilst continuing to provide the complete source code, including: Failsafe Audit, Fine grained Access Control (ACLs), reserved versioning (in addition to unreserved/concurrent), user defined change sets (bug id's), atomic commits (commit id's), multi-site repository replication (write through proxy) and many other features both minor and major. CVSNT 2.0.51, 2.0.58, 2.5.01, 2.5.02, 2.5.03, 2.5.04 (Multi-Site) and EVS 3.1.01 were all produced as a result of this financial support. Other commercial 'CVSNT clients' do not financially support the project, and some companies cleverly craft their software so that the most useful parts are 'wrapped around' the 'open source' parts so that they do not have to release the source code and can enforce payment terms, which we have made a conscious decision not to do. If you earn a wage and as a part of your wage earning activity you use CVSNT: please alert your management to the benefits that using CVSNT has brought you and advise them to support the project by purchasing CVS Suite (CVSNT) for £85 / €98 / $139 for each person in your team. Annual support and software maintenance is also available and so is CM Suite (EVS) which works with SVN and CVS clients for £255 / €294 / $419. http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/en.asp In Chris Anderson's book "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" he describes open-source projects like CVSNT as requiring a 5% take-up rate of the 'Premium Edition' to be economical. If only 1% of people downloading CVSNT from our own web site in 1 year bought 1 copy of CVS Suite we could quadruple our staff and provide much more innovation. Much other software you have to pay for well before you learn the limitations/problems; with CVSNT of course it's the other way around - but if people do not support the projects that produce the software they then rely on to do paid work, in future there will less choice and much less innovation. We are unwilling to take 'donations' due to the many differing legal and natural definitions for this in each country around the world - by purchasing one of our products we can continue to invest in development of Open Source Software. Here is what some other people wrote on this newsgroup last year about the value of purchasing CVS Suite: Jan Keirse; Mon Nov 10 2008 "I would like to confirm this to everyone listening who hasn't bought the product yet. I learned most of the things I know about CVS before I got the eBook and it took me ages. I can confirm that the eBook alone is worth the license fee, even without support it would. It saves numerous hours in finding out how everything works and how things can or should be done. The online manual is nothing compared to this! And I'm not getting paid to say this ;-)" Andy Southby; Mon Nov 10 2008 "The ebook is invaluable and have to admit that I bought a personal copy of the last release just to get the ebook. I'm not getting paid to say this either but a free copy of the 2008 version would be nice ;-)" You can e-mail sales questions to sales at march-hare.com or call our sales team (numbers on the web site) or buy online: http://store.march-hare.com/ Your support of the project in the many ways that you do is always appreciated. Regards, Arthur Barrett Product Manager