Friday, February 4, 2011 — With the transition last year of the Subversion® project to the Apache Software Foundation ("the ASF") — which "provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of open source software projects" — the Subversion Corporation has become superfluous. As such, the Board of Directors of the Corporation is pleased to announce today its official dissolution.
The Subversion Corporation was established in 2006 to be the legal steward of intellectual property (IP) related to the Subversion (now, Apache Subversion) project. As the company that founded the Subversion project, CollabNet, Inc. recognized the importance of centralizing this IP and protecting the brand of the increasingly popular version control software. CollabNet helped to establish the Subversion Corporation for exactly that purpose and immediately began working on behalf of the Corporation to officially register the Subversion name and logo trademarks. Over the next several years, the Subversion Corporation served the project, negotiating the acquisition of relevant web properties, serving as a mentoring organization in Google's Summer of Code program, and collecting contributer license agreements (CLAs) from those who donated Subversion's most valuable asset — its source code.
In 2009, the membership of the Corporation voted to formally submit a request for Subversion's adoption into the Apache family of software projects. The Subversion project has long had close ties with the ASF: besides a technical symbiosis between Subversion and several other Apache software projects, the two have very similar community management goals and practices, no doubt due to the fact that many of Subversion's core developers are long-time ASF members. Subversion was accepted into the Apache incubation process in late 2009, and graduated to a top-level project in early 2010. As part of this process, the Subversion Corporation entered into a licensing agreement with the ASF regarding the Subversion IP, and transferred its Subversion domain name and trademark registrations to the ASF. With these holdings now safely in the ASF's hands, the membership of the Subversion Corporation voted to dissolve the now-redundant corporation.
We wish to express our sincere gratitude to those who worked so diligently on behalf of it and without which we arguably would have been incapable of performing our chartered duties.
First, we are grateful to CollabNet — and specifically, Maria Carlile, CollabNet's General Counsel — for the aforementioned initial setup of the Corporation and trademark registration activities performed on its behalf. CollabNet also graciously donated the services of their professional accountants for a much-needed review and correction of the Corporation's income and franchise tax standings.
We are also extremely grateful to the legal team at the Software Freedom Law Center. As joint counsel for the Corporation itself and, simultaneously, counsel to the Apache Software Foundation, Karen Sandler and her team (most notably, Justin Colannino) were instrumental in helping the Subversion Corporation transition the Subversion project into the Apache Software Foundation. The SFLC further assisted the Corporation with the wind-up and dissolution process, greatly expediting several of the required inquiries and filings.
We wish the Subversion project continued success, and are confident that it will find it at the Apache Software Foundation.
— Jim Blandy, Ben Collins-Sussman, Mark Phippard, C. Michael Pilato, and Hyrum Wright, Subversion Corporation Directors