[ferd]

CVS certainly sucked by today's standards, and SVN was indeed a big improvement, and Git much more so.

All I wanted to stress is that the "lock-before-you-can-touch" approach was the norm in the enterprise world at the time. IMHO, this fact alone made SVN (even CVS) better than all the commercial products which I used at the time.

When some of the "enterprise" world started adopting SVN and commercial products started relaxing the locking mandate, the open-source world was already embarked on the decentralized model (git, darcs, arch, mercurial, etc).

[hermitdev]

I used ClearCase quite a bit (and other (ir)Rational tools) at a previous job. It sucked pretty hard. But, it didn't _require_ you to lock files. It _strongly encouraged_ you to, and made working with hijacked files a pain in the ass, though. In practice, this is largely worked around with branches, though. And, branches from branches... Kind of mimicking the distributed workflow we know with git with more branches.

But, yeah, ClearCase sucked pretty hard and was frustratingly slow. Also, too easy to miss adding files to source control and really annoying interface to _find_ view-private files. 0/10, would not use again unless I had a gun to my head.