Sure, I can fix it. I wanted to catch up with you on IM as we'd like to regain access to the hudson-labs infrastructure as well. There are a few other VMs we're not sure exactly where they are.
Do I read this as, "We deliberately locked you out and removed your attribution, and we hint we can fix things, and we want you to do certain things for us, but no we aren't actually saying we'll fix anything and no we didn't tell you about it in advance?"
Really, I would just walk away from anyone trying to deal with me on this basis. Come out and say what you did and what you're going to do. If you need my help with something, ask, and don't try to hint things are tied together when they aren't.
> Really, I would just walk away from anyone trying to deal with me on this basis.
Agreed, with one exception -- to expose the other side to the public. I think Oracle is showing its face (again) and I think it is in the community's interest to _let_ it keep showing its face.
No. If he had started something about Oracle, what would have happened to Oracle? Some redditors and HNers would seize the opportunity to complain about how horrible Oracle is and then everyone would forget about it a few days later. On the other hand, what would have happened to Kawaguchi? Some potential employer could see him complaining publicly about one of his former employers and decide that it's a bad idea to hire him.
In all, there's little good that would come out of it and a ton of risk for Kawaguchi.
That is why I emphasized the word _let_. He doesn't have to editorialize their actions and responses. Those speak for themselves. Just share them on his blog -- he is not complaining, he is just communicating to the open source community the state of the Jenkins project. Let others comment and let Oracle damage its own image.
> what would have happened to Oracle?
Well eventually the same thing that happened to SCO ;-)
They are losing credibility in the PR domain even more. This is not directed towards the general public or even Oracle's corporate customers, but towards the hackers, sysadmins, and other tech workers. The opinions of those people matter however, and eventually they will be consulted by those that make purchasing decisions. A general mistrust and dislike of Oracle will take its toll.
For a while they had a Unix some wanted and nobody thought at the time that there will be a free better Unix variant one day. Then GNU/Linux came along...
I read it more as being a mistake on Oracle's part and van Zyl expecting some kind of quid pro quo to fix it. I don't think van Zyl actually caused this or anything. It seems to me to be more indicative of van Zyl being an opportunist trying to get something out of fixing a mistake. After all, if this were some kind of diabolical plot, you'd imagine that van Zyl would ask for more than the location of some servers.
UPDATE: According to tweets in another comment, I'm wrong and van Zyl did cause this. I'm still inclined to attribute this to incompetence rather than malice though.
I've been following a bit the Hudson debacle and I'm not surprised things are tense there, especially after the new fork.
But I do not think it's as simple as it seems and blaming everything on Oracle's "native evilness" is a bit naive. Quite the contrary, I'm starting to get the feeling that the 'community' might have been played a bit and all the Oracle bashing used as a trampoline for the fork.
Take this message for example: why did Kohsuke feel the need to post this publicly? He left Sun/Oracle, just had closed negotiations between Oracle and his new employer Cloudbees regarding Hudson (done while working at Sun) and recently got "the community" to vote on a fork. He certainly has enough detail contacts to resolve this privately if needed, so why would he choose to post this publicly?
But yeah, the reply in itself couldn't have been more insinuating.
Do I read this as, "We deliberately locked you out and removed your attribution, and we hint we can fix things, and we want you to do certain things for us, but no we aren't actually saying we'll fix anything and no we didn't tell you about it in advance?"
Really, I would just walk away from anyone trying to deal with me on this basis. Come out and say what you did and what you're going to do. If you need my help with something, ask, and don't try to hint things are tied together when they aren't.