CollabNet, Inc. kick-started Subversion development in early 2000. Their aim was to create a better, open-source replacement for CVS, the then-dominant version control system. Subversion shares the same basic principles of CVS, but was created from scratch to avoid its bugs and limitations.
Subversion has since been adopted by a tremendous amount of different companies and organizations, resulting in steady continued development of Subversion itself, and the creation of a wide variety of Subversion client applications.
In November 2009, Subversion joined the Apache Software Foundation, becoming “Apache Subversion” three months later. Although there are organizations that still use CVS, Subversion is now the world's most used centralized version control system.