CVS & Java Development ????

How important is CVS in regards to Java Development? Is this something that most programmers need? Am I going to have to learn this in order to participate in open source?
Paul

(The more general question is:) How important is source control in regards to software development?
As soon as you get more than a couple of people using the same code base you will need some sort of source control.
CVS isn't that difficult to pick up, in most cases only the most basic features are used of any source control package. Checkout, checkin, merge.
I am not sure what the most popular source control package is for open source people.

I've used both CVS and SourceSafe for source control. You will find that SourceSafe is a little more user friendly but CVS is definitely more powerful.

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