Unlike some categorizations in the comments here, I wouldn't say that the devs are anti-Oracle, they're pro-Hudson. I think they've tried to work with Oracle as much as they can, and certainly shown more patience than I think I would have. Once it became clear Oracle didn't necessarily have Hudson's best intentions at heart, things started to go downhill.
Oracle has not been especially communicative, and it's not especially respectful to literally pull the plug on a project's infrastructure without decent prior warning. For all the failings of java.net, when it was run by Sun, they did at least make sure people knew ahead of time of planned outages (the unplanned we don't discuss).
From my POV, it looks like Oracle has two heads: there's the nasty, legal head that is happy to sue everyone with Sun's patent arsenal, and there's the plain incompetent head that doesn't have a clue how to interact with open-source development. We're seeing the latter here, and I guess the community is just fortunate that Hudson isn't patent-encumbered (as far as I know). I don't think there's any particular malice here, just a general level of incompetence and hubris.
Very odd that the Oracle VP states that in order to remain a part of the "Java community", Hudson should remain hosted on java.net. There is no way to quantify this but it seems like a very, very tiny minority of OSS Java projects use this service for hosting.
Silent "larger community" user has spoken.
Cool names might be 'NortheastPassage' or 'Passage', for the water-navigable route explorer Henry Hudson sought. Or something based on features near the Hudson river in New York, like 'Adirondack' or 'Albany'. Or something in contrast or crossing of the river, like 'EastRiver' or 'GWBridge' or 'HollandTunnel' or 'Verrazano'.
> OH: "it might run weird on our butler ci. what is it? jenkins?"
Hudson is too important to me, and lots of other developers, to be subject to the whims of Oracle executives. If ever there was a case where forking is the most obvious answer, this is it.
As for people who have built a business out of Hudson: "Hudson" is only a name and if Oracle wants the name, let them have it.
If you rename it I'll do my part in helping with the marketing of the new name by spreading the word among my peers and I suspect most other Hudson users would do the same.
>package hudson;
You might own the trademark Oracle, but you just licensed the use of it to everyone.
Doesn't say anything about the name. Trademark law and copyright law are related but very distinct. If Oracle owns and enforces the trademark "Hudson" in the context of continuous integration software, and they say "Stop using the name Hudson", you must comply regardless of any copyright licensing in effect.
Compare Firefox which has a free software license but prohibits use of the Firefox name if any modifications are made to the code. This is why it's called Iceweasel on Debian -- as I understand it, even a security patch is technically enough to violate the contract.
There are several licenses written that say "you may not use our name to promote your version of the software" or something like that. MIT is not one of them.
Oracle is welcome to fork it and give it a tougher license. Dont expect it will see many commits after that tho.
You must bear in mind that this is open source. Oracle does not own this. It doesn't appear to be aware of this.
name the fork SSBounty
I know it is chic to dump on Oracle these days. Can we please get a neutral title or the same title as the original post? I disagree with the use of the word "another" and the question mark. A better title would be "Conflict between Oracle and Hudson project".
EDIT: It looks like Andrew Bayer, a core developer on the Hudson project, submitted the story. It also looks like any comments calling for reasonable, rational debate are being down-voted. That's all I'm asking: reasonable, rationale debate.
It looks like that Oracle doesn't like the way that the project is run and this isn't an attack on open source. This is a disagreement about how the project is run. But we can't even have that debate because the topic has been slanted.
2. It's not known whether this will lead to a full blown "conflict" (although, who are we kidding, it probably will)
Want to fork? Then fork! You don't need anyone's permission. In this day of DVCS it's about two commands to fork back should relations improve. Using github is different only in degree, not in kind, from using a different IDE on your local machine. You don't have to have a holy war about it. If your development is better as a result you will win, if not you won't. It might be fun to throw a little tantrum, but it won't make the code any better.
If I'm a developer, especially a developer on a project for which I'm not getting paid, I'll do the development using whatever the hell tools I want, thanks. And if someone tells me I can't, frankly, it's not really up to them.
>If I'm a developer, especially a developer on a project for which I'm not getting paid, I'll do the development using whatever the hell tools I want, thanks. And if someone tells me I can't, frankly, it's not really up to them.
This is exactly the position of the Hudson developers, so why call them drama queens? They can't "just fork it". It's a large open source project with 100+ developers. They need to plan, get consensus, etc. Those "meetings" you seem to disdain aren't just for people to bitch.
I hope they do change the name and fork it. Oracle needs to learn a lesson here and they are absolutely powerless (for once) other than having the TM on Hudson.
As Cory Doctorow put it in For The Win, [1] meetings, and everything that go with them are the price of being superhuman. (Where "superhuman" is defined as "not just sitting in a tree eating berries".)
[1] http://craphound.com/ftw/Cory_Doctorow_-_For_the_Win.htm
Because it is open source, we can't stop anybody from forking it. We do however own the trademark to the name so you cannot use the name outside of the core community. We acquired that as part of Sun.
The issue though is of course not that cut and dry. The community would want to think over and debate any such move as it would have a long-term impact on the overall working relationship with Oracle, Sonatype, other Hudson contributors/sponsors, etc...
Yes they are. If you read through the posts in the actual mailing list, consensus has been built--the consensus is "move to github".
See several developers' comments here: http://groups.google.com/group/hudson-users/msg/5c6ec5888594...
http://groups.google.com/group/hudson-users/msg/02a9ca4abd7d...
http://groups.google.com/group/hudson-users/msg/9d4c44b83a1a...
This entire thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/hudson-users/browse_thread/th...
http://groups.google.com/group/hudson-dev/browse_thread/thre...
The only reason it hasn't happened already is because Oracle wants to bitch. I'm calling the developers drama queens too because instead of forking after consensus was built, which was the logical thing to do, they are still talking to Oracle and/or blogging about what Oracle will or will not let them do.