Who are March Hare Software?

March Hare began in Sydney Australia in 1998 as a loose collective of expert database programmers and has grown into a worldwide firm based on our expertise in designing and building enterprise IT solutions.

March Hare Software development lab is based in Manchester UK, and iSeries development in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Why do all links to CVSNT go to March Hare Software ?

March Hare Software are the primary contributors to the CVSNT project. We co-ordinate the testing and release process as well as manage the source tree.

Where can I find March Hare Software annual reports?

March Hare Software Ltd (UK) and March Hare Pty Ltd (Australia) are not publicly traded companies and therefore do not publish annual reports.

Who are the Directors and Shareholders of March Hare?

March Hare Software Limited (UK) and March Hare Pty Ltd (Australia) are not public companies and the shareholder registry is not a matter of public record. The existing shareholders wish to remain anonymous and no additional equity is currently being sought. The share registry is closed.

The current board of directors for each company can be found through the relavent legislative authority for UK and Australian Company Registrations.

Are March Hare Software going to begin charging for CVSNT?

Component parts of CVSNT (CVSAPI, CVSTOOLS, CVSFS) are licensed under the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL) which allows 3rd party plugins to be created using any available license.

March Hare Software will produce such plugins under commercial license terms.

Why does March Hare charge for CVS Suite?

1.
There are many users of CVSNT who would like to contibute to the project but do not have the time to contribute to the code, documentation and testing and that for the price of the CVS Suite they can contribute and also get the benefit of some support and some great add on software for CVSNT.

2.
CVSNT and CVS Suite cost March Hare Software a lot of time and money to create. The enhanced TortoiseCVS, Workspace Manager, Release Manager and the Bugzilla and Build integrations make using CVSNT much easier which helps you be more productive.

3.
There are many people who would like to begin using version control and will benefit from the software however find it difficult to find all the information required to get started and if they do find it then it is difficult to understand or implement. CVS Suite solves this problem by matching a version of the documentation with versions of the software in a single package.

What payment methods are available for CVS Suite and CVS Professional Support

From our Online Store you can select any of our software products to purchase. All of our software is delivered by download from the customer area.

The Online Store accepts the following cards:

Can I use an American Express card to pay for CVS Suite and CVS Professional Support

Also see the following FAQs Payment Methods accepted via the online store and Tax and VAT

Tax and VAT charges when ordering online.

Can I use a Visa Purchasing card to pay for CVS Suite and CVS Professional Support

How is the TortoiseCVS included with CVS Suite different from the standard "free" version?

• Browse server for checkout of module or single file
• Edit dialog (must be enabled in preferences)
• Defect number integration on Edit, Commit and Merge
• Additional Preferences
  • Read only files on checkout regardless of watch state
  • Set ACL on edit for working with shared sandboxes
  • Edit dialog preferences
  • Disable looking for Modules file (not requried for CVSNT)
  • Eclusive editing options
  • CVS Server setting (for use with SSH)
• Improved context menu handling
• Show bug numbers in revision graph and log
• Support for CVSNT SSH secure authentication
• Is tested with the other components of CVS Suite
• Behaviour is consistent with the documentation included in CVS Suite
• Is supported by March Hare Software

What is the March Hare Software vision for CVS / CVSNT

Implementing version control effectively has a cost, but the benefits far outweighs that cost.

To see the vision come to pass we believe in making version control solutions widely available at minimum cost and tailored for use by the "average" computer user.

For version control to be effective it must ensure the integrity of all managed items in each stage of their lifecycle, make their evolution more manageable, and their interrelationship clear.

The effectiveness can be improved by implementing automated techniques for Insulation, Security and Access Control, Lifecycle Management, Communication and Detailed Reporting.

The result of using effective configuration management should include improved productivity, reduced cost of production, and shorter time to deliver completed work.

How do March Hare Software plan development of CVS Suite and CVSNT

• Q1: July -September
• Q2: October - December
• Q3: January - March
• Q4: April - June

This direction and these goals are always guided by our overall vision for CVS / CVSNT. Our planning is high level mostly conceptual, however usually includes some specific technical targets that we feel will provide a better platform for feature growth.

Issues such as reliability and performance are always considered but are not explicitly labelled or targetted at this level.

Each quarter the targets are further refined to include specific features or respond to market conditions and customer feedback.

What releases of CVS / CVSNT have March Hare planned for 2008

• Q1: CVSNT 2.5.04 Stable
• Q1: EVS Windemere RC
• Q2: EVS Windemere Stable
• Q3: CVSNT 2.5.05 Stable
• Q4: CVSNT 2.5.06 Stable

This plan is provided only for information. By publication of this plan March Hare Software do not warrant or guarantee these features or dates or versions in any way.

What releases of CVS Suite have March Hare planned for 2007

Advocacy and marketing in 2005/2006/2007

March Hare Software are the primary contributors to the CVSNT development project and 2005 through to 2006 have been successful years for us with the development of the CVS Professional and CVS Suite products. Through these products we have been able to assist many commercial software developers in creating good CM systems based on CVSNT. In many cases they have told us they were on the verge of choosing other "closed" systems due to a percieved lack of commercial support for the "open" ones like CVSNT.

Our success is based on the quality of the CVSNT product, which is a reflection of the quality of the people who contribute including Tony Hoyle, Torsten, Jerzy, Bo, Oliver, Glen and many others. My personal thanks goes out to all the contributors: large and small.

The basic layout of development plans for 2007 are in the FAQ here.

CVS Suite 2.5.04 will be released soon including the new CVSNT Server and Client 2.5.04, and updated eBook, WorkspaceManager, ReleaseManager, VS.NET integration (SCCI) and updated integration for Bugzilla and Audit. CVS Suite 2.5.04 also includes improved large file support for slow wide area networks.

During the two years we have also had the fantastic opportunity to meet up with some of the project contributors who are not part of the official March Hare team, including Derek Price - longstanding contributor to CVS and editor of "Essential CVS", the CVS bible for many years. March Hare Software also purchased new development hardware for Torsten Martinsen to use with the 64 bit support of TortoiseCVS.

Looking ahead to 2007 and 2008 we have a major new product release EVS Windemere - a new open standards based engine for CM processes including support for many different clients (including CVSNT clients), a daabase backend for the server and much more. There are also some exciting new commercial products to make versioning in the corporate environment simple and effective. We will continue to make the server and command line client available without charge¹.

We have spent some of the past two years on advocating for CVSNT directly with other commercial organisations, as well as in public forums such as the GNU CVS newsgroup, Config Mgmnt Newsgroup, Wikipedia, CM Crossroads etc, much of this involves clearing up commonly held misconceptions and directing people to the correct newsgroups for support questions. Derek Price and others in the CVS team have been very supportive in this, helping people understand that the products are different, when CVSNT may be worth considering and where to go for the support.

CVSNT is a mature product with most of the features of commercial software packages that cost significantly more to implement. Platform support, IDE integrations, security, simple authentication, change sets, audit, mergepoints, and of course inexpensive commercial support.

CVS Suite provides a clear, easy to follow, step by step guide to using CVSNT in a commercial develpoment environment and the tools to do it with.

In 2005 and 2006 we have marketed these products through our new web site (including some pages in German, Japanese and Spanish), sales and support teams in Australia, Germany, Great Britain, North America and Spain and began or continued working with Microsoft, Sun, IBM and HP and advertised with Visual Studio 2005 and iSeries buyers guides.

In 2007 we plan to:

• translate the entire site to German, Japanese and Spanish
• open a sales and support office in the USA (we already have a toll free number in the USA for sales and support that is diverted to our other centres)
• publish regular press releases
• make it easier to have both CVSNT and CVS installed on one linux system and approach Linux vendors about including CVSNT in standard builds
• approach commercial CVS source code repository hosts about the commercial benefits of using CVSNT
• release a print version of the eBook - All About CVS, probably through Amazon, initially in English but with some luck before the close of 2007 in German, Japanese and Spanish too.

March Hare appreciates the Open Source Communities support in the success of these. A list of ways to contribute is in the FAQ here.

During the last audit period (the 12 months to August 2005) CVSNT was downloaded 1.4 million times, our aim is that more people find it, and more people implement it successfully.

What features are March Hare Software Planning for CVSNT 2.5.04

• Usability Enhancements
• Server performance statistics added to Audit Database
• Support for SuSE Enterprise 9 EMT64
• Improved performance with large files on slow wide area networks
• Built in repository caching / repository replicaction for use in slow wide area networks

This plan is provided only for information. By publication of this plan March Hare Software do not warrant or guarantee these features or dates or versions in any way.

What features are March Hare Software Planning for CVSNT 2.5.05

March Hare Software are currently planning to deliver the following features in CVSNT 2.5.05:

• To be advised

This plan is provided only for information. By publication of this plan March Hare Software do not warrant or guarantee these features or dates or versions in any way.

What features are March Hare Software Planning for CVSNT 2.5.06

March Hare Software are currently planning to deliver the following features in CVSNT 2.5.06:

• Merged features with CVSNT SJIS
• Localised Messages for German and Japanese

This plan is provided only for information. By publication of this plan March Hare Software do not warrant or guarantee these features or dates or versions in any way.

What features are March Hare Software Planning for CVSNT for Mac OS X

March Hare Software are looking to add another resource to our development team to assist in the delivery of enhancements to CVSNT for Mac OS X. Planned features include:

• Mac OS X System Preferences
• Mac OS X WorkspaceViewer
• Spotlight plugin (for repository server)
• Dashboard widget
• Sync integration

The timeframe of adding this resource will depend on growth of the CVSNT Mac community (both commercial and open source).

This plan is provided only for information. By publication of this plan March Hare Software do not warrant or guarantee these features or dates or versions in any way.

What features are March Hare Software Planning for EVS Windemere

March Hare Software are currently planning to deliver the following features in EVS Windemere (previously known as CVSNT 3.1.01):

• Atomic Commits
• Database backend (no more RCS files)
• RCS "interface" for legacy integrations

Additional features for EVS Windemere are planned to be announced in July 2007.

This plan is provided only for information. By publication of this plan March Hare Software do not warrant or guarantee these features or dates or versions in any way.

What priority do March Hare apply to support requests.

The severity levels are:

• Repository corruption
• Server Security
• Workspace corruption
• Server crash (core dump)
• Client crash (core dump)
• General Faults / Installation
• CVSNT client compatibility
• Non CVSNT client compatibility
• Enhancements
• Platform support

Can I move my version history from Visual SourceSafe, PVCS, ClearCase or Perforce to CVSNT?

Visual Source Safe, PVCS, ClearCase and Perforce are each excellent version control solutions each with many features, and each with unique features.

CVSNT is not an emulator designed to replace any of them. However these tools solve problems generally defined by the phrases version control and configuration management, and those are the same problems that CVSNT is designed to solve. Therefore in some situations it may be possible to switch one for the other and have very little impact on your business.

How many people use CVSNT?

Gartner research has published statistics in the past on Software Configuration Management Market Share based on license revenue, however we have been unable to find any research done based on use in the field.

Most other industry analysts use this same approach (eg: Worldwide Software Configuration Management Tools 2004 Vendor Shares", #204821, December 2006 [previously #33588, June 2005] by IDC). This research appears designed to assist vendors and investors in determining how much money is available in the marketplace for these tools and to which vendor the majority of the money is going. The research does not benefit the person who is choosing a tool based on popularity (in use by many people on a day to day basis) or effectiveness (has achieved productivity and reliability gains that software configuration management is designed to). In particular the studies:

• give a natural preference to software which is costly over software which is economical
• does not account at all for software implemented without a license cost
• provide a market share benefit to companies which sell software which is then later replaced due to implementation difficulties.

Gartner research have given us a quote for performing some study based on use in the field, however no budget has been allocated to fund this in 2005/2006. Furthermore it would not be possible to publish the results of this study since Gartner require a signed non-disclosure agreement from any person who views it or information distilled from it.

Built / executable copies of CVSNT are included in TortoiseCVS and WinCVS and also downloaded from the main March Hare web site. From these sites roughly 30,000 copies per week are downloaded. This does not include copies of CVSNT which are built from source in the "traditional open source" way or copies of any version which is in development or test (unstable).

The best research we have is incidental and that indicates that CVSNT is the most widely adopted versioning tool in use in the Software Development industry today.

Can I integrate CVSNT with some other software

March Hare Software can assist you in integrating your application with CVSNT by:

• Access to the CVSNT Development Manager, Product Manager and other technical staff
• Code samples of how to implement integration
• Features to make integrating easier
• Write the integration on your behalf

If your project is open source licensed (GPL or similar) then your best approach is to send a request for development assistance to the open source CVSNT newsgroup. To contact the newsgroup you can subscribe here or if you have a news browser installed you can click here.

If your project is commercially licensed or you wish for March Hare Software to provide some assistance then you will need to have a Professional Support contract. The correct level contract will depend on the amount of assistance you require, contact a sales representative for more information.

Can I create multiple synchronised repositories with CVSNT

March Hare Software have our own repository hosted in UK, Australia and the USA. A sales consultant will be able to assist you further.

Why do March Hare collect so much information when I download CVSNT?

The page http://march-hare.com/downloads/ is the only place you can download the evaluation version of UD6 - software for connecting Uniface Development Environment with version control such as CVSNT.

Are the commercial releases of CVSNT the same as the free ones?

March Hare Software provide two levels of commercial support. Professional customers receive patched versions of CVSNT as frequently as every fortnight (but not usually so - since there are many fortnights with no bugs reported). Professional support customers have access to the entire history of stable and patched versions.

CVS Suite (basic support) customers have access to the entire history of stable and patched versions for the release which they purchased a license for.

Additionally Professional and Basic level support customers also receive some plugins and client applications which are not licensed under the GPL and are not available for free. The source code for these is not available in the CVSNT repository.

Conversely not all versions of CVSNT are made available to professional and basic support customers. Releases of CVSNT made to these customers undergo additional quality assurance and release procedures.
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