When I started working on my project it was a large thriving project with hundreds of people both directly and indirectly involved. The company had to hire out a couple of floors in a neighboring building to house this project due to its size.
I vaguely remember from my school days that some of the rather simplistic assumptions that always went along with our homework assignments. They were always clearly defined, they usually never required any graphical interface, and you never needed to do documentation. In the real world, the task was rarely clearly defined, you do need to provide documentation and the budget for tools was always either really small or non-existent.
However, one thing that almost always did exist was some form of source code control. You need to make sure you can reliably build your programs and that none of the code gets lost. That is why I was so surprised at this project. The only tools that was given was a word processor on a slow pc. The good news is that we can compile the code on the server. Not a very productive environment but we could work.
I asked my manager if we could get a source code management tool installed so we don’t trip over each other changes. The answer was no, this had been discussed with the client and they had standards. You could only use the standard tools that where company approved. The reason the answer was no is because there was no budget for their standard code management tool.
Ok, but what about a “free” open source solution. Well, the answer for that was no as well, but it wasn’t entirely clear why this would not be acceptable.
Things in the corporate world don’t always make all that much sense.