Hudson, Oracle and Jenkins: what was it?

Many have heard that Hudson and Oracle had some differences. Less widely had the news spread that on the 29th, Hudson was renamed Jenkins. Under the cat you can read my abstract translation of an explanatory article by one of the main Jenkins developers and a brief summary of the events that happened after it was written.

• 2009.06.02 : In the light of major infrastructure issues with Java.net, The development community discusses alternatives , including SourceForge, Google Code, Kenai, Berlios, GitHub, and so on. Some key components, such as issues.hudson-ci.org , are moving from Java.net. Discussions about moving the repository from Java.net to another place like GitHub come up almost every four months, usually after serious problems with the availability or reliability of Java.net.
• 2010.11.01 : A discussion about adding Winston Prakash , a developer from Oracle, to the owners of a project on Java.net (before that there was only one owner - Kosuke Kawaguchi Kohsuke Kawaguchi , founder and lead developer of Hudson). Winston mentioned that his request was an idea for the Oracle executives, as they believe that he should be co-owner of the project. During the discussion, the developers decided that this was quite acceptable, and, as a good gesture from the community towards Oracle, they gave Winston co-owner rights
• 2010.11.17 : At the suggestion of Andrew Bayer, one of the contributors to the core, the mailing lists are being moved from the unstable Java.net at that time to Google Groups.
• 2010.11.19 : Hudson's migration is scheduled at the same time as Glassfish, but none of the project owners know about it due to a technical error.
• 2010.11.22 : Shortly after midnight, developers notice that SVN is not available; following her disappear and mailing lists. The Hudson project on Java.net begins migrating to a new infrastructure (formerly known as “Kenai”). A group of key members of the Hudson community are trying to speed up the move to Google Groups on this blog , and via twitter .
• 2010.11.23 : Frustrated by the fact that the repository is blocked (and on the “kernel” day, there are about 3-8 commits, not to mention more than 300 plugins), Kohsuk proposes to move to GitHub in the new mailing list. Most developers support this idea.
• 2010.11.27 : Andrew Beyer makes a formal proposal to move to GitHub and sets a deadline for filing objections next Tuesday (2010.11.30)

And on Monday, Ted Farrell ( Ted Farrell ) sends a message to the mailing list, in which he expresses his concern about the situation:

Oracle's goal is to expand the community and make Hudson stronger. Perhaps you just do not know, but the Hudson user base is very large, much more than you can see in the mailing lists or forums. What is sad is how many of these users don’t contribute ( well, I don’t know how it is in Russian, say ) before the core and don’t take part in the discussions. They want it, they just do not think that they will be heard. And we want to be heard. We need to make the Hudson community a place where anyone who wants can come and participate. In the coming weeks we will announce some innovations that should contribute to this.

But now we will stay on java.net. We are sure that it is important for Hudson to stay close to the rest of the java community, as well as to use the many cool features that will soon appear on java.net. You can use GIT on java.net as well, and moving to github for this is not necessary.
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...

Since the project is open, we cannot prevent someone from forking it. However, we own the trademark, so you cannot use the name outside the main community. We purchased this with Sun. We hope that everyone who is working on Hudson right now will do exactly as they claim they want and continue to work with us, making Hudson stronger.

(Ted's letter is quite long, you can read it in its entirety here )

As was to be expected, Ted's answer was met with mixed emotions, ranging from misunderstandings and ending with disappointment.

Nigel Magnay, a contributor to the Git plug-in for Hudson, tried very succinctly to explain the merits of Github:

Just support git! = Git support on github. They are working to the fullest to provide communities with the best development tools, and I doubt that kenai can not only overtake, but at least catch up with them.

...

I do not understand anything.

What will you ban the Hudson developer community?

TE: Are you saying that being the owners of the name Hudson, you forbid the community (for yourself) to choose which infrastructure (bug tracker, wiki) to move to? And repositories also can not be selected?

So far, developers have actively voted to go to google groups for mail, to github for version control, and to their own website for tracker bug and information.

Ted's answer contained one of the most important sayings for the entire discussion:

Nigel, I just want to say that I believe that the final decision on what to do regarding the infrastructure belongs to Oracle, and the decision must be made based on the wishes of the community.

For a while, the turbulence of events took place, and then, on January 11, Andrew publicly proposed to rename the project and finally move from the Oracle servers. A vote was taken , as a result of which 214 people voted for the renaming and 14 for maintaining the status quo.

On January 29, we registered the jenkins-ci.org domain and started renaming the groups, twitter account, and so on.

The initial governance board will consist of Andrew Bayer, Kohsuke and, if Oracle and he chooses, Winston. If Winston does not want or can not, choose another person from the community.

We can wait for further developments, although most are already over.