Oracle to hand open-source Hudson project to the Eclipse Foundation | Hacker News Reader

Oracle to hand open-source Hudson project to the Eclipse Foundation

itworld.com

47 pointsjfruh13 comments

This is an ugly desperate move and the Eclipse Foundation shouldn't take part in the fight and reject the project.

But I pretty sure Oracle will bind money to the offer and the foundation will say yes. Oracle aim is control through bureaucracy and the Eclipse Foundation is just the perfect match for that ...

The whole process stinks, the reasonable thing to do is just give the Hudson trademark to Kawaguchi. Oracle won't do that because they want to be in control of the winning project, and they know that without the now-Jenkins community the Hudson project is going to quickly become irrelevant.

Moving to the EF is too little, too late, and I don't think the Jenkins community is going to bite. They already dealt with the pains of switching to a new name and anyone who needs Java CI and isn't completely blind will find Jenkins just fine. Remember Ethereal? Yeah me neither.

It looks like the eclipse foundation will be happy to adopt hudson. From their executive director:

"In our view, Hudson is coming to Eclipse for all the right reasons. The Eclipse community is itself a big user of Hudson, and we all look forward to the growth in momentum, innovation and predictability that will result from this move. With the addition of the Eclipse community processes for development, release and intellectual property management, we’re confident that the Hudson community and ecosystem will be thrilled with Hudson as an Eclipse project."

http://mmilinkov.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/hudson-now-at-ecli...

So it sounds from the article like the people who initiated the Jenkins fork already declined EF administration. That means it is unlikely that it would remove the fork. Also, something the article didn't explicitly call out.. Is the Hudson trademark also part of this proposal or does that stay in Oracle's sole control?

Here's my take: 1. Oracle wanted full control of the project, which was clearly unlikely once Kohsuke left Oracle.

2. Once the Hudson team started acting somewhat autonomously, Oracle tried to frighten them out of doing anything without Oracle's say by invoking trademark litigation.

3. Rather than have a protracted battle, the Hudson team did actually begin talking to Oracle about taking the project to a foundation, such as Eclipse or Apache, to ensure legitimacy of process from both sides. Those talks broke down. I don't know any particulars, but I can believe that Eclipse was rejected and Apache favored. If Oracle was truly agnostic about it, Apache should have been fine. This makes me worried that there may have been (and still be) backroom deals going on to ensure Oracle gets preferential treatment. Your guess about keeping control of the Hudson trademark might well be something that got passed around.

4. Oracle absolutely did not plan for the Hudson team walking away from the name, and were arrogant enough to believe that when they did, the Hudson brand would live on and Jenkins would fade away.

5. Once is was clear that the heart of an open-source project is its developers, not its silent users (big surprise, right?), Oracle have tried to backpedal and have run into the arms of Eclipse to try and bring developers back.

It won't work, and like another commenter said, if Eclipse does take them up on it, it will just look bad on Eclipse. Sadly, the Hudson name is completely tainted at this point. And its not correct to say "Well, that's OK, because users don't really care about all this stuff" because the users are developers, and they do care about this stuff. The rabble-rousers on the sidelines, like Sonatype, also look like jerks, but at least Maven is under Apache Foundation control, so while I can hate Sonatype, I can still use their product without too much fear.

Hudson = moribund.

Check github. All the developers now do Jenkins.

Except for one of my ex-coworkers. When I asked him why did he chose Hudson over Jenkins, he murmured something about superior Oracle support.

If I was really desperate for "support" of a dead open-source project, I would have chosen Atlassian's Bamboo.

Why did they fight the founders in the first place? Hopefully other projects will be treated differently from them in the future.

It seemed to me the founders decided there was a fight when Oracle got the trademark for Hudson. Was there more to the 'fight' than that?

The fight was over control.

The trademark issue meant that it didn't matter what the community wanted, it could be 1,000,000 : 1 against, if the 1 was Oracle, they could stop (or force) anything they wanted.

Commercial interests had wanted to move to Eclipse before. Most developers see the Eclipse process as overly bureaucratic and unfriendly - and therefore were -1 on that.

The whole process has been an attempt to try to force-feed the development community into eclipse, whether they like it or not. Because they hold the trademark, they have the control.

Well, thing is, eclipse was disliked before, and it is disliked now. I seriously doubt any devs will be considering it.

The short version is that the developers voted to move the project's source code hosting to github after several infrastructure problems with java.net, including unplanned downtime (there were some issues of the wrong groups notified for actual planned maintenance, etc).

The team at Oracle clamped down on this and said no, you cannot do this, all decisions regarding infrastructure are to be made by us, and claimed that a (silent) majority of the larger "user community" was not in favor of moving to Github, although why these people did not speak up on the developer list or why casual users cared where the source code was hosted was never explained. After seeing how hard Oracle was to work with on simple things like hosting, the core developers voted to fork the project rather than live under a situation where Oracle could make threats because of their claim to own the trademark to the name Hudson.

Longer version: http://jenkins-ci.org/content/whos-driving-thing and http://jenkins-ci.org/content/hudsons-future

Every time I see that name change, I mentally prepend Leeroy to the name Jenkins. Given how well known that meme is, I have to wonder whether it was intended at some level.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU if you don't get the reference.

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