Our main company business is offshore software development and graphic design. Some time ago (about two years) we have chosen CVS as a source management tool for our group. We have found it very useful and appropriate for our purposes. We use it for Java developments, VC, VC .NET developments and so on. What we fell short of from the very beginning was good integration with SCC API (Microsoft IDE's). At first we used Jalindy Igloo. Very quickly we discovered many bugs and problems with it. We suggested our free help in fixing problems to the author of Igloo, but without any success, he was too busy. After that we tried to fix Igloo sources that were freely available. But we came across two major problems: the sources were of poor quality (it is enough to say that the main class there is called "Eskimo"), and parts of sources were closed according to the Microsoft NDA agreement. Poor quality was not a big problem, and we even made cleanup in public part of the sources. But then we discovered that bugs and problems were present not only in public parts, but also in closed parts. There was no possibility to fix problems in closed parts, and so we decided to create our own plug-in.

We started to use first versions of our plug-in in the begging of 2003. We found them very useful, and our productivity with CVS increased. At the end of May 2003 we published the plug-in, initially for free use to give other developers possibility to take advantages of CVS. But then we started receiving too many requests for improvements and support. We could not continue this work on free-of-charge basis. At the same time we did not want to create another "dead" product (like Igloo) and decided to make the plug-in commercial. Its price covers our expenses for improvements and support. Really, development of a plug-in of such quality is a very hard task. It is much harder than some independent GUI for CVS creation (like WinCVS or Tortoise). It is not enough only to cover CVS functionality, it is important to provide compatibility with SCC API, or make the plug-in closer to the SourceSafe (we think that IDE's implementing SCC API are tested mainly with the SourceSafe). For example, Igloo is not SCC-compatible plug-in, and it can be considered mainly as a status showing (checkin/checkout) plug-in. We tried to achieve full compatibility of our plug-in with all SCC functions. During the plug-in development much more problems arose than we had expected, but now all of them are solved.

So we made the plug-in commercial and sell it for 19$ USD per single license. Why is the price so low? Maybe the plug-in is of poor quality? No. That's because we want to make it highly available even for non-commercial users, or users from not-rich countries (like ours). Also we do not take fee for CVS itself, SCC switcher utility and Conflict solver. These are not our tools. We take fee only for work on the plug-in that we have already carried out, for future improvements and for support. Those who contact us can confirm that we provide quick and qualified support, even for non-customers.