In 1995, Karl Fogel and Jim Blandy founded Cyclic Software, a company for commercially supporting and improving the Concurrent Versions System (CVS). Cyclic made the first public release of a network-enabled CVS (contributed by Cygnus software). In 1999, Karl Fogel published a book about CVS and the open-source development model it enables. Karl and Jim had long talked about writing a replacement for CVS; Jim had even drafted a new, theoretical repository design, and had come up with a good project name. Finally, in February of 2000, Brian Behlendorf of CollabNet (http://www.collab.net) offered Karl a full-time job to write a CVS replacement. Karl gathered a team together and work began in May. Because Subversion was developed openly under a free license, it quickly attracted a community of developers.
The original design team settled on some simple goals. They decided that Subversion should be a functional replacement for CVS: it should match CVS's features, preserve the same development model, but still fix the most obvious flaws. And Subversion should be similar enough to CVS that any CVS user could start using it with little effort.
After fourteen months of coding, Subversion became “self-hosting” on August 31, 2001. That is, Subversion developers stopped using CVS to manage Subversion's own source code and started using Subversion instead.
While CollabNet is credited with initiating and funding a very large chunk of the work (it pays the salaries of a few full-time Subversion developers), the project is still a typical open-source project, governed by the usual meritocratic rules. CollabNet owns the copyright on the code, but the code is available under an Apache/BSD-style license which is fully compliant with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. In other words, anyone is free to download, modify, and redistribute Subversion as he pleases; no permission from CollabNet or anyone else is required.