If you don't have write privileges into the SVN repository, you have no ability to revision control your changes without creating a tracking repository of your

If you don't have write privileges into the SVN repository, you have no ability to revision control your changes without creating a tracking repository of your own. This is fairly unique to open source software -- it's not something that occurs in an organization, and should only occur when a user without commit access is doing large-scale modifications to a project. Unfortunately, the functionality often used to maintain divergent forks where individuals fail to push small hacks/changes immediately back to their origin project. Creating a SVN branch for every experiment rapidly gets out of hand. Out of hand how? I've worked in organizations where every single feature received a developer specific branch (eg, branches/tolenka-feature-xyz) and never ran into trouble. The big difference with DCVSes is that scaling across lots of developers is not a problem, branches are strongly encouraged, and merging works really well. Given merge tracking, merging works more or less the same as a DVCS. As far as scaling across developers, I'm not sure what the issue is.