Svn is pretty well suited for maintaining central control. Whether the person who has that central control wants to give out commit access is a different question.
Any chance we could nip this right here? There're plenty of well researched papers online comparing the differences between these SCM's. The folks here prefer distributed SCM's. Most of us have our reasons. If we are _actually_ about to switch from SVN we'll discuss it properly on the ML.
Although it appears all of the committers and most of the contributors already use either git or mercurial.
-Dormando
