Oracle proposed today that the Hudson project be transferred to the Eclipse Foundation, complete with code re-licensing under the Eclipse Public License as well as the domain and controversial trademark.
Oracle will continue to lead the project, along with Sonatype who have been instrumental in migrating the Hudson plugin system towards a JSR 330/Dependency Injection style of representation. However, the move to the Eclipse Foundation has also interested others, such as VMware and Tasktop, who have been invited to participate as committers on the project. With the top-level Mylyn project providing application lifecycle management from within Eclipse (which already includes a Hudson/Jenkins connector), and the recent move of Tycho (which was released under the org.eclipse namespace this week), the Eclipse Foundation's story on interoperable build and management tools makes it a natural place to host the Hudson builds.
It is also hoped that the migration of Hudson to be an open-source managed project may help with the split between Jenkins and Hudson, which primarily focussed around the issues associated with the trademark and governance model. Since the Eclipse Foundation will now own the trademark, and the governance model is well known and understood, hopefully this can act as a point of co-operation between the Hudson and Jenkins products.
The Eclipse Foundation pays a significant amount of attention to IP cleanliness, so the creation of a project proposal is just the start of a long journey. In addition, the re-licensing of the existing codebase to move to the Eclipse Public License will be fine for code contributed via Eclipse company members (Sonatype, Oracle) but any outside additions to the core may need closer examination before the code can come through.
Hudson will continue to encourage the plugins be available via Maven Central, although this isn't a prerequisite for creating and hosting a Hudson plugin. Many plugins are compatible with both the Hudson and Jenkins projects; hopefully, with a new plugin model being available for both, the move to Eclipse will help draw a line under the Hudson/Jenkins debate and a true open-source governance model will be possible under the Eclipse Foundation.
InfoQ asked Jason van Zyl what he thinks this means for the Hudson/Jenkins community:
I believe that Hudson moving to Eclipse is the best possible outcome for the community. The Eclipse Foundation is a great place for open source projects, arguably the best, and I think the Hudson project is going to find a lot of support at Eclipse. Whatever baggage there has been, I think Eclipse provides a level playing field for all interested parties and this move provides a great opportunity for the Hudson and Jenkins projects to come together under one project again.
Update: Responses from around the web.
In our view, Hudson is coming to Eclipse for all the right reasons. The Eclipse community is itself a big user of Hudson, and we all look forward to the growth in momentum, innovation and predictability that will result from this move. With the addition of the Eclipse community processes for development, release and intellectual property management, we’re confident that the Hudson community and ecosystem will be thrilled with Hudson as an Eclipse project.
The Hudson project is a proposed open source project under the Technology Top-Level Project.
This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. Please send all feedback to the Eclipse Proposals Forum.
What is Oracle's ongoing investment in Hudson?
Oracle remains fully committed to the Hudson project and will continue to invest in the project both in terms of leading the project at Eclipse and continuing to staff full-time employees in the areas of development, QA, documentation and product management.
Does Oracle still view Hudson important for their customers?
Absolutely. As application software development evolves to become ever more complex, the core tasks of managing the development processes around it can quickly exceed the capacity of manual systems. We believe that a continuous integration solution such as Hudson is key to all enterprise development efforts, including, but not restricted to, those undertaken by Oracle itself and its customer base.
- Demonstrating its commitment to the developer and open source communities, Oracle today announced that it has submitted a proposal to the Eclipse Foundation to create a Hudson project in Eclipse and contribute the Hudson core code to that project.
- As part of the process, Oracle will transfer the Hudson trademark and the Hudson-ci.org domain name to the Eclipse Foundation.
- Under the new proposal, Oracle will be the project lead with Sonatype, Tasktop, and VMware as initial contributors. Other companies are also listed as project supporters.
- To help ensure that the proposal is in the best interests of the developer and open source communities, Oracle will solicit feedback from the Hudson community to make sure its opinions are heard before any proposal is finalized.
- Hudson is a industry-leading open source “continuous integration” (CI) server that increases productivity by coordinating and monitoring executions of repeated jobs, making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project and for users to obtain a fresh build.
While there may be many questions about this move, the proposal phase of the Eclipse Development Process makes the path forward clear. The next stage is soliciting input from the community-at-large. As I see Eclipse as a great home for this technology, I have agreed to mentor the project and look forward to the community discussions around this proposal and the increasingly central role of continuous integration in the ALM stack.
Kohsuke Kawaguchi (Hudson creator, now leading the Jenkins fork at CloudBees)
We were very interested in having the trademark moved under the custody of a neutral 3rd party, but they were very clear that that’s not acceptable to them. And it also disappoints me that they decided not to reach out to the Jenkins community about this move, when we’ve been conducting our governance meeting all open out there for anyone to join. But I guess they are never really interested in working with us.
It should be noted that Ted Farrell, chief architect and senior vice president, Tools and Middleware at Oracle, has disputed this account, saying "...it was talked about in detail in the discussions that Andrew, Sacha and I had off-thread. I have the emails stating our proposal, which was both Eclipse or an Eclipse-like process was too heavyweight."