subversion was well-loved by its loyal users at the time as part of "net culture"; speaking of SVN any other way is revisionist. Meanwhile, plenty of companies sold proprietary source code control, since forever; few people loved those products as rigor and management were the constant, user-oriented features not so much, and there was no sense of community or user-control in sight.
That makes some sense. A lot of the other technical decisions made in the early days of the company were surprisingly well-considered in retrospect, so at a time when it's either SVN or e.g. BitKeeper, a reasonable person would probably also want to stick with SVN.
