Interviews

Edd Dumbill interviewed Chia-liang Kao, the creator of SVK, a distributed version control system layered on top of Subversion:

SVK allows distributed development using existing infrastructure, which means you don't need to deploy a new system for your whole organization. SVK works best with Subversion, but you can also seamlessly branch from CVS, Perforce, or even git repositories. SVK lets you commit directly back to Subversion repositories and "commit as a patch" to other systems or to Subversion repositories you don't have commit access to. Such patches can then be applied by the maintainer, using either a regular patch tool, or SVK, which also will help filling the commit log.

[...]

It makes things easier for contributors to open source projects to maintain their patches as a local branch and accept changes from upstream, rather than being treated like second-class citizens who have to deal with patch hell just because they can't commit. You can do this with many other version control systems using "vendor branches," but mostly they require too much work to maintain a short-lived branch just for a patch or two that haven't yet been reviewed and committed.

Open source projects sometimes fork because it's too hard to integrate branches that have diverged too much. Painless merge makes it much easier to branch instead of fork.

John Osborn interviews Anders Hejlsberg at O'Reilly. Mostly focused on the new features in C# 2.0 with a little touch of how they are used to build 3.0 features.