When I saw the new Source Gear ‘evil mastermind’ t-shirts, I had to have one for my nerd warddrobe. So I struck a Faustian bargain with Source Gear mastermind Eric Sink. The photo below is part of the bargain. Sorry about that.
Given that version control isn’t the most wildly exciting of topics (no offense intended) I think their comic book campaign is a very imaginative piece of marketing. I wish them every success with it. While I am plugging Source Gear I should mention that they offer a free one-developer licence for Vault. This could be very useful for microISVs out there looking for a source control tool. So far I am pretty happy with Subversion, apart from the ‘don’t come crying to me for help’ approach to merging branches.
I also recommend Eric’s blog and the resulting book as an excellent source of marketing information for techies. It helped me a lot.
Have I earnt my t-shirt yet Eric? This blog has also earned me one sale of PerfectTablePlan and a couple of dollars in referral fees from e-junkie. At this rate I will soon be able to retire from programming to blog full time. Watch out Scoble.
Successful Software 
Hi
I’m busy migrating a project to Subversion. You mentioned the “don’t come crying to me for help’ approach to merging branches.” Could you elaborate and the kind of problems you’ve seen?
My understanding (from reading the O’Reilly book) is that you are on your own when you merge a branch back into the head. i.e. you have to do it ‘by hand’. Tools such as Vault and Perforce probably give you a lot more help. Anyway, I’m doing to have to do it for time in a few weeks. Ask me again then!
Let me suggest Ubuntu’s bazaar. See bazaar-vcs.org. It’s particular beauty lies in the fact, that it needs no dedicated server, but only a ssh or ftp server. It claims to be designed with the use by many authors – and threfore ease of merging branches – in mind, but I did not try that yet.