- Hudson is a free continuous integration (CI) tool written by Kohsuke Kawaguchi in Sun. [1]

- Oracle took control of Hudson as part of their Sun acquisition.

- Hudson devs wanted to move the infrastructure from Java.net to Github due to frustration with Java.net.

- Oracle objected the move to Github. Oracle said they owned the trademark to the Hudson name and the devs were free to fork under a different name if they wanted to. [2]

- Devs forked Hudson as Jenkins. [3]

- BONUS: Hudson also moved to Github. [4]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_(software)

[2]: http://groups.google.com/group/hudson-users/msg/cf0d72a7d97f...

[3]: http://jenkins-ci.org/content/jenkins

[4]: http://java.net/projects/hudson/lists/dev/archive/2011-02/me...

Oracle, the owner of the Hudson trademark, said that Hudson could not move itself to github even though the community wanted to. Oracle said the community would face legal action if they did the move anyway. The Hudson community responded by abandoning Hudson and renamed the Free code to Jenkins to avoid Oracle's trademark. Now all the plugin developers that previously wrote "Hudson" plugins are saying that they are now writing "Jenkins" plugins, and that Oracle has effectively killed one of their more popular open source projects.

Oooooops.....