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Oracle hands Hudson to Eclipse, but Jenkins fork seems permanent

Oracle's Hudson moves alienated the open source community, and those behind the fork say Oracle's latest move was also done without them

By Paul Krill, InfoWorld, 05/04/11

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Oracle's gesture may be too late -- and is questioned
But a developer of the Jenkins core saw Oracle's gesture as a bit late. "It's a shame no one from Oracle or [Hudson participant] Sonatype reached out to anyone from the Jenkins community -- we'd still love for them to rejoin the community and contribute to Jenkins," said Andrew Bayer. He said he does not know why Oracle did not propose donation of the Hudson trademark sooner, when efforts were underway to prevent the Hudson-Jenkins split. "While they proposed an Eclipse-like governance/development process, they never expressed a willingness to donate the trademark to an external foundation."

Both Bayer and Kawaguchi questioned whether Oracle has the legal clearance to reassign Hudson intellectual property. "I'm not sure whether Oracle actually has all the necessary rights to reassign copyright and relicense the full Hudson [intellectual property] -- that's definitely going to be a challenge for them," Bayer said.

Doubt that the Jenkins fork will be integrated back into Hudson
Asked if Hudson and Jenkins could be reunited, Bayer was doubtful: "Everything that's happened on the Hudson/Eclipse front up until this morning has been entirely behind closed doors on a corporate level, without any community discussion or public involvement, while the Jenkins community has been conducting its governance meetings in public, with all members of the community invited and contributing. We'd love for Oracle, Sonatype, et al. to rejoin the Jenkins community, but the fact that no one from either company reached out to the Jenkins community on this suggests they're not interested in that."

Bayer stressed the strength he believes Jenkins now has over Hudson: "The Jenkins organization on GitHub now has almost 500 repositories, the majority of those plug-ins, and almost 100 public members, while Hudson only has its core repository available and only four public members. Of the 25 most commonly installed plug-ins from before the split, 21 of them have moved primary development to focus on Jenkins, with the remaining four not having any changes during that time. In fact, 40 new plug-ins have been added to Jenkins since the split, while only one has been added to Hudson. The development community has definitely made its choice heard."

Still, Oracle's Eclipse route for Hudson could serve to reunite the divided Hudson and Jenkins efforts, said IDC analyst Al Hilwa. "I would guess that this may surprise the Jenkins folks because there appears to have been a conspiracy theory that Oracle was going to do some bad thing with Hudson, like turn it into a commercial product. It may be time to come together again under one code base now that it's under the Eclipse Foundation."

Licensing and other changes expected for Hudson
Changes afoot for Hudson include altering license requirements so the software is not bound to the Gnu LPGL (Lesser General Public License), which requires release of all code affected by the licensed code. Third-party libraries in Hudson use this "viral" license, which makes it difficult to repackage software with other software because it all must be released, said Oracle's Farrell. Corporations don't like this license requirement, he added. An Apache or Eclipse license is expected to replace LGPL.


For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

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