Oracle was attempting to leverage their (claimed) ownership of the trademark on the name of the Hudson Continuous Integration system to take full control of the project (otherwise open source). Most notably, they tried to block a move of the central source repository to github.
The response was a proposal to change the name. This was put to a vote among the dev community, who voted in favor, 214 to 14.
The Oracle member of the interim project governing board was invited to continue past the name change, but has apparently declined.
Not a great day for anyone, I guess, but Oracle really doesn't come out of this looking good...
Oracle really hasn't done a very good job of managing open source communities and contributors. It makes one wonder if distancing their properties from open source is intentional. I can't imagine they've been honestly trying to make things work, given their heavy-handed approach.
Either it's: intentional, or they just don't give a damn.
Considering the sources of most of their revenues, I'd say #2 is most likely. Companies that have been in Enterprise that long, making hand-over-fist money from mediocre products, acquired IP, and vendor lock-in often have a "quaint rag-tag" view of the FOSS development community.
I tend to think it's a myopic viewpoint, but then again we are a tiny indie shop, and they are multi-billion dollar company.
If they don't give a damn, why were they fighting to keep it on their infrastructure?
If they had succeeded what would they have gained?
If they hadn't given a damn then they would have let Hudson choose where to host their software and mailing lists and all that fun jazz.
If it was intentional they could have foregone getting a trademark on the name Hudson, and they could have just asked the Hudson development team to move off their infrastructure.
Oracle's actions in this case seem to be completely random. It is almost as if there was no direction or thought behind what they did.
There seems to be no pattern or reasoning about what Oracle is thinking or attempting to do...
It's a classic case of not invented here syndrome mixed with incompetence when it comes to open source software. They wanted it on their servers because they were their servers. No more, no less.
The pattern is very simple. Control leads to power which leads to coerced profits. The tighter the control, the greater the power, and the greater the profits. That's their formula, and it seems like the only one they know.
It seems a bit confusing from the title vs the post:
214 in favor of Jenkins is what the original post says.
Also mentioned is "Jenkins is not Oracle's project, nor CloudBee's
project, nor my project, nor Kohsuke's project - it's the community's
project, and it's going to thrive."
<quote>
"The vote is closed, and the results are in. More than half of the total
votes were from ineligible voters, but the result would have been the same
either way. The final result of all eligible votes is as follows: 214 votes
to rename, and 14 for the status quo. You can see the individual votes at
https://groups.google.com/group/hudson-jenkins-vote.
So what does this mean now? Well, it means Jenkins lives. We've registered
jenkins-ci.org, though it's empty at the moment. In the coming days, we will
be renaming the existing Google Groups to jenkins-@googlegroups.com,
renaming the Twitter account from @hudsonci to @jenkinsci, and renaming our
organization at Github from hudson to jenkinsci. I wanted to make sure
everyone had notice ahead of time that this was happening, so that no one
gets surprised by changes to their incoming mail, etc. As said before, the
initial, interim governance board will consist of me, Kohsuke and, if he and
Oracle are willing, Winston. If Winston is unwilling or unable to continue
in that role with Jenkins, we will select a replacement interim member. The
interim board will work on the details of a more permanent governance
process going forward. Discussions on the infrastructure changes (including
things like the Maven groupId/artifactIds, etc) will be in public, on these
lists. We're working to get the JIRA and wiki contents migrated over to the
Jenkins site, and hope to work with Oracle to get that done in the next
couple days.
Putting aside logistics, I want to personally thank everyone for voting, and
especially thank everyone who voted for renaming for supporting the Jenkins
project and its future. Jenkins is not Oracle's project, nor CloudBee's
project, nor my project, nor Kohsuke's project - it's the community's
project, and it's going to thrive. " *</quote>
I fail to understand why would someone change names for an established 'brand'.
(there are deserving candidates that do need a name change - Go, Closure and few hu la la from Google)
Oracle owns the trademark name 'Hudson' and so they'd be able to exert a degree of control over the community that they weren't okay with. This vote is the result of a proposal to rename to 'Jenkins,' so they could get out from under the thumb of Oracle.
And IIRC Oracle had been actively attempting to exert this degree of control, to the point of interfering in infrastructure changes that project contributors wanted to make.
Not to mention apparently being complete dicks to Kohsuke Kawaguchi; who not only founded the project, was the primary contributor while at Sun, and remains the primary contributor since leaving; but also has a rep for being a very nice person. Apparently Oracle / some oracle VP Ted were big enough assholes that KK declined to work with them in any capacity in the future [1].
So yeah, Oracle continues making friends with open source folks.
Oracle has a long history of making friends with Open Source...
This along with the whole OpenSolaris, and various other projects just makes me sad. Yes, they aren't viable business strategies (especially the amount of people Sun employed just to work on various random Open Source projects), but there is something to be said for good will.
All of this is also leaving a sour taste in the mouths of people who have budgets and make decisions, yes many people will continue to purchase stuff from Oracle but ultimately I have a feeling this will come back to haunt them. I know quite a few places that ran exclusively Sun for their servers are now looking at whitebox machines running Linux and BSD.
Oracle was attempting to leverage their (claimed) ownership of the trademark on the name of the Hudson Continuous Integration system to take full control of the project (otherwise open source). Most notably, they tried to block a move of the central source repository to github.
The response was a proposal to change the name. This was put to a vote among the dev community, who voted in favor, 214 to 14.
The Oracle member of the interim project governing board was invited to continue past the name change, but has apparently declined.
Not a great day for anyone, I guess, but Oracle really doesn't come out of this looking good...