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Comment by rst | Hacker News Reader

To supply a little context:

Oracle was attempting to leverage their (claimed) ownership of the trademark on the name of the Hudson Continuous Integration system to take full control of the project (otherwise open source). Most notably, they tried to block a move of the central source repository to github.

The response was a proposal to change the name. This was put to a vote among the dev community, who voted in favor, 214 to 14.

The Oracle member of the interim project governing board was invited to continue past the name change, but has apparently declined.

Not a great day for anyone, I guess, but Oracle really doesn't come out of this looking good...

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Oracle really hasn't done a very good job of managing open source communities and contributors. It makes one wonder if distancing their properties from open source is intentional. I can't imagine they've been honestly trying to make things work, given their heavy-handed approach.

Either it's: intentional, or they just don't give a damn.

Considering the sources of most of their revenues, I'd say #2 is most likely. Companies that have been in Enterprise that long, making hand-over-fist money from mediocre products, acquired IP, and vendor lock-in often have a "quaint rag-tag" view of the FOSS development community.

I tend to think it's a myopic viewpoint, but then again we are a tiny indie shop, and they are multi-billion dollar company.

If they don't give a damn, why were they fighting to keep it on their infrastructure?

If they had succeeded what would they have gained?

If they hadn't given a damn then they would have let Hudson choose where to host their software and mailing lists and all that fun jazz.

If it was intentional they could have foregone getting a trademark on the name Hudson, and they could have just asked the Hudson development team to move off their infrastructure.

Oracle's actions in this case seem to be completely random. It is almost as if there was no direction or thought behind what they did.

There seems to be no pattern or reasoning about what Oracle is thinking or attempting to do...

It's a classic case of not invented here syndrome mixed with incompetence when it comes to open source software. They wanted it on their servers because they were their servers. No more, no less.

The pattern is very simple. Control leads to power which leads to coerced profits. The tighter the control, the greater the power, and the greater the profits. That's their formula, and it seems like the only one they know.

Larry Ellison makes money from his software. No exceptions. They are pissing on the open source community on purpose, make no mistake.

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