I posted this in the reddit thread today, after being part of a larger discussion last week.
Theo de Raadt co-created AnonCVS back in 1995/1996. He and Chuck Cranor from AT&T Labs Research published a paper in 1999 about it.
OpenBSD was the first open source project to make access to their source repository public to non-developers, before AnonCVS you needed commit access to review history, annotations and even checkout. OpenBSD had a read-only CVS tree even before their website was created in 1996.
There are no known prior cited examples of a project providing this level of transparency to the development process, most open source projects at the time only provided "snapshots" of development in the form of compressed source directory tarballs, excluding RCS files. SUP and FreeBSD's ctm(1) only let you merge "current" remote changes to a local non-versioned directory.
Theo de Raadt co-created AnonCVS back in 1995/1996. He and Chuck Cranor from AT&T Labs Research published a paper in 1999 about it.
OpenBSD was the first open source project to make access to their source repository public to non-developers, before AnonCVS you needed commit access to review history, annotations and even checkout. OpenBSD had a read-only CVS tree even before their website was created in 1996.
There are no known prior cited examples of a project providing this level of transparency to the development process, most open source projects at the time only provided "snapshots" of development in the form of compressed source directory tarballs, excluding RCS files. SUP and FreeBSD's ctm(1) only let you merge "current" remote changes to a local non-versioned directory.
http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf
http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-slides.pdf
And here's an additional historical tidbit relating to FreeBSD and AnonCVS: https://twitter.com/canadianbryan/status/517714611089719296