Tigris.org

» see tigris.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 7 April 2020 a line of text appeared above every page on tigris.org: this site is going to be decommissioned and shut down on 2020-07-01, please copy and archive any data you wish to keep before that date. No blog post anywhere, and no name signed to it. Twelve weeks, and then twenty years of open source project hosting went off the internet.

Tigris.org was CollabNet's open source community, running CollabNet's own SourceCast platform: issue tracking, mailing lists, a wiki, downloads, and version control in CVS or Subversion. CollabNet was founded in 1999 by a group that included Brian Behlendorf, who had helped start Apache, and Subversion was its in-house project from 2000, written to be the thing that replaced CVS. Tigris was the house Subversion was built in.

It stopped accepting new project proposals in July 2014, six years before it closed. For a forge, the door shuts long before the lights go out.

~ the dossier ~

~ who lived there ~

The famous tenant was Subversion, with TortoiseSVN beside it, which is how a whole generation of Windows developers met version control in the first place: a green tick and a red exclamation mark painted onto folder icons in Explorer. ArgoUML was there too, the Java UML tool that half a computer engineering department ran at some point, and so was cvs2svn, the script everyone used on the way out of CVS.

By the time the banner went up there was almost nothing of consequence left. Subversion had moved to the Apache Software Foundation a decade earlier. ArgoUML went to GitHub in 2019. When somebody raised the shutdown on the Subversion dev list on 15 March 2020, Mark Phippard answered that he could not think of anything not already migrated or preserved elsewhere, and that the site might go down any day.

~ the dates nobody updated ~

The copyright line at the bottom of the page carrying the shutdown notice reads 2001 to 2009. The Wayback Machine has subversion.tigris.org answering 200 as late as 6 July 2020, five days past its own deadline, still rotating CollabNet house ads for Subversion 1.5 support and a merge client.

CollabNet had by then been folded into CollabNet VersionOne, and the brand went on to become Digital.ai in the same year the forge closed.

~ the part i touched ~

Subversion is the half of this I actually used. Through university and the first working years, svn was simply what version control meant, and on Windows you did it through TortoiseSVN's right-click menu rather than a terminal. Nobody treated it as a product with a company behind it, let alone a company that was also running the website the code lived on. Then git arrived, and svn became the thing inside the old repository you did not want to open.

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