Talk:Revision Control System

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First release date

Copyright date is a clue, but it is frequently abused by developers who have not actually published a program on the given date. Rather, it is more often used as a guide to when they began work on the program. The rcs manpage does not give an initial release date; a WP:RS addressing the given statement is needed rather than editor's inferences TEDickey (talk) 12:03, 21 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

free (sic)

I found a few authors asserting this. However the closest from Tichy would be this message which quotes from a defunct (and non-archived) website: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-rcs/2009-08/msg00001.html (and I seem to recall having read this before). The various discussions make it clear that rcs was distributed in source form, free of charge from the outset. Tichy's notice in the rcs version 3 provided in the 4.3BSD contrib area (which also has emacs) made it clear that he was concerned about it being incorporated into some commercial product (for instance, hijacked by AT&T). If there's a verifiable reliable source to the contrary, it might be interesting to discuss. Discussing unpublished, or make-believe sources is not interesting. TEDickey (talk) 00:54, 11 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As mentioned, in 1986 a person from Techische Universität Berlin tried to convince me to convert from SCCS to RCS but he claimed that he could not give me the source because he had to pay 1000$ to get it - so I would have been forced to use the binaries in the university. For this reason, it is obvious that we need a reliable source for the claim in the WP article as it claims something that is not aligned with my observation. For the same reason, it is important to have a reliable source for the time when the RCS sources have been given to the GNU people as I guess that this is the time when RCS became freely available. Schily (talk) 12:04, 11 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've seen no WP:RS which would support your comment. TEDickey (talk) 01:33, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Given the fact that my information is from a reliable source, it is obvious that we need either a more reliable source that confirms that RCS was freely available and followed the OSS rules or we need to remove the related claim in the WP article. Schily (talk) 10:46, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Meanwhile I was able to verify that RCS was indeed non-free in it's beginning and made (mostly) free on May 1 1989. Schily (talk) 11:12, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I trimmed the parts which are due solely to your opinion, and asked for a WP:RS for an interesting point. TEDickey (talk) 10:08, 13 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

GNU maintained?

There's a mailing list via GNU, and it's a GNU project as demonstrated by its presence in http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/rcs/ (combined with the site description at the top of the filesystem). TEDickey (talk) 00:50, 11 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The problem with that ftp site is that they frequently remove old versions. Try to e.g. find a gtar version from around 1989 when the FSF acquired PD-tar/SUG-tar from John Gilmore. Do you believe that they acquired RCS in 1993? From my memory, this is aprox. the time when RCS became free. Schily (talk) 14:06, 11 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Probably not. I have earlier versions, found readily enough through web-searches. You might consider reading the change history. TEDickey (talk) 01:34, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it may be that there was a GNU variant around 1990, but there does not seem to be a reliable way to prove that. But note that this is a minor problem compared to the fact that RCS was non-free in its beginning. Schily (talk) 11:01, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]