Apache Software Foundation takes Subversion in

Subversion, the open source version control system, is now an Apache Software Foundation incubator project. Subversion was previously sponsored by software lifecycle tools vendor CollabNet, and hosted at tigris.org, CollabNet's own forge site concentrating on collaboration tools. Both the Apache Software Foundation and CollabNet were founded by Brian Behlendorf, the main developer of the Apache HTTP server in its early days.

Subversion largely replaced its predecessor, CVS, soon after it was released in 2001. One of the design goals of Subversion, or SVN, was to be "a better CVS", and overcome many of the earlier package's limitations. Subversion is also licensed differently to CVS, using the Apache licence instead of the GNU GPL. Subversion itself has since lost ground to other, more recent version control systems like Mercurial and Git, which have a distributed architecture, as opposed to SVN's centralised repository. This latter style of source control has found more favour with community-based open source projects.

The move is a natural fit for both projects, since the ASF uses Subversion for its own version control, and Subversion already uses the Apache licence, and relies on several other ASF projects like the HTTP server and the Apache Portable Runtime.

The Apache Incubator is an initial stage that all projects go through before they're accepted as full projects. While in the Incubator, projects are examined to ensure they meet the ASF's licensing standards, and to build a development community around the project.