We’ll be contacting Project Gutenberg with a link to this article...
The article makes good points, but makes them in a way that's likely persuasive only to people who already know about version control. Suppose you represent Project Gutenberg and you've never heard of distributed version control. Here's what you get told:
It’s downright foolish not to take advantage of the wonders a good VS can work with this sort of content: versions are revisions, editions are branches, commit logs preserve integrity and posterity, and an index of all changes is forever kept. Nothing is ever lost or overwritten, and the changes over time can be analyzed, indexed, and reviewed... [N]othing could be easier than forking the original, making your changes, then opening a ticket to propose that PG merge your changes back into their "official" distribution!
Some of this will sound interesting, but most will sound like gobbledygook. I also doubt whether the paragraph that follows-- which describes how a DVCS will make it easier for people who intentionally corrupt works found on PG to benefit from the future work of PG members-- will excite the sorts of people who rise to the level of decision-maker at Project Gutenberg.
In short, this is good advocacy for getting people who know about DVCS to help out PG, but it probably isn't good advocacy to get PG interested in DVCS.
The article makes good points, but makes them in a way that's likely persuasive only to people who already know about version control. Suppose you represent Project Gutenberg and you've never heard of distributed version control. Here's what you get told:
It’s downright foolish not to take advantage of the wonders a good VS can work with this sort of content: versions are revisions, editions are branches, commit logs preserve integrity and posterity, and an index of all changes is forever kept. Nothing is ever lost or overwritten, and the changes over time can be analyzed, indexed, and reviewed... [N]othing could be easier than forking the original, making your changes, then opening a ticket to propose that PG merge your changes back into their "official" distribution!
Some of this will sound interesting, but most will sound like gobbledygook. I also doubt whether the paragraph that follows-- which describes how a DVCS will make it easier for people who intentionally corrupt works found on PG to benefit from the future work of PG members-- will excite the sorts of people who rise to the level of decision-maker at Project Gutenberg.
In short, this is good advocacy for getting people who know about DVCS to help out PG, but it probably isn't good advocacy to get PG interested in DVCS.