Found an interesting article about the future of Subversion.  There are certainly quite a few questions coming up as to how Subversion will fit into developers’ toolboxes in the future - what with the fast emergence of distributed VCS like git and mercurial - and how the Subversion development team might focus their efforts.

I’ve chatted with other developers, and we’ve all come to some similar private conclusions about Subversion’s future. First, we think that this will probably be the “final” centralized system that gets written in the open source world — it represents the end-of-the-line for this model of code collaboration. It will continue to be used for many years, but specifically it will gain huge mindshare in the corporate world, while (eventually) losing mindshare to distributed systems in the open-source arena. 

One of the main points of this particular article is the fact that - in the corporate world at least - Subversion isn’t going anywhere.  It’s a mature system that has certainly become a “strictly-better” replacement for CVS, and for quite a few organizations and projects, it makes the most sense.  Personally, I think it’s going to have limited appeal in the future, as developers move towards decentralized systems like git.  And, where the early adopters go, the rest follow.  There’s nothing hotter for early adopter developers right now, than git.