Nobody has shown to me that SVN is not capable of doing this - or Mercurial or ...put your favorite VCS name here...
Here is a (simple innacurate) list of what a DCVS can do that a VCS usually cannot do: 1. commit when you don't have a working internet connection 2. see the diffs between two very old revisions without a working internet connection 3. don't wait 5-10 seconds to see the diffs between old revisions because of the internet latency 4. use branches and merge them without fear of making mistakes (because you can simply undo what you did before pushing to the remote) About the two first point, if you suggest that you can do it with svn by setting up your own local svn server and do a deep copy of the svn server and then using that one to commit/view diffs when you don't have a working internet connection this is just too much work compared to a DCVS for it to be a real alternative. Point 1 & 2 are more important than you think, it frees people to hack & work on the project without bothering others on the central repo. They can hack & throw away changes and only present stuffs when it's ready (because you can throw away unpushed commits). Point 3 is not crucial but in the long run it's very nice to have, now when I switch back to projects using SVN I get frustrated having to wait. Point 4 is the real important point here imho. My 0.02$ Philippe