>>14
All the distributed SCMs support "centralization", I don't think you understand them (or how do you think projects like Firefox work? certainly there's an authoritative central repository, this is no different from whatever you have in mind)
SVN is misguided because they're spending a lot of energy solving the wrong problems. Case in point: the working copy library rewrite. A ton of work, same shit (actually worse so far). What they should have done: checkout mirrors the repository locally, ala distributed. SVN supports all the needed operations directly from the repository (getting files, making diffs and such). The repository is compact on disk, specially compared with the old working copy format (it's very possible that it'll be smaller). But more importantly, you suddenly don't have to get the network for most of the commands, since you have all the history locally. A much better design.
In fact you can simulate it by using the mirroring tool and then checking out your local mirror. Works awesome but it's not practical unless you have some support scripts (you have to commit to the original repo, not your mirror...)
I really don't understand what they're trying to do anymore. It's like they consider anything distributed as pure evil and ignore all the good ideas, rather burrowing themselves in their aging design.
BTW from the look of it I think a lot of people here have the misconception you need some kind of server to work locally with SVN or git. This is completely untrue. SVN can work the repository directly, and with git you are the repository (and if you want to share/publish it, ftp/http is more than enough)