
Oracle in conflict with another open source project? - abayer
http://www.hudson-labs.org/content/whos-driving-thing
======
Lewisham
For a little bit of context, I've done some plug-in commits in my time and met
the important guys in this project.

Unlike some categorizations in the comments here, I wouldn't say that the devs
are anti-Oracle, they're _pro-Hudson_. I think they've tried to work with
Oracle as much as they can, and certainly shown more patience than I think I
would have. Once it became clear Oracle didn't necessarily have Hudson's best
intentions at heart, things started to go downhill.

Oracle has not been especially communicative, and it's not especially
respectful to literally pull the plug on a project's infrastructure without
decent prior warning. For all the failings of java.net, when it was run by
Sun, they did at least make sure people knew ahead of time of planned outages
(the unplanned we don't discuss).

From my POV, it looks like Oracle has two heads: there's the nasty, legal head
that is happy to sue everyone with Sun's patent arsenal, and there's the plain
incompetent head that doesn't have a clue how to interact with open-source
development. We're seeing the latter here, and I guess the community is just
fortunate that Hudson isn't patent-encumbered (as far as I know). I don't
think there's any particular malice here, just a general level of incompetence
and hubris.

~~~
j_baker
I agree. This sounds like it's just a classic case of Not Invented Here
syndrome more than anything else. I've been in a similar situation before: a
big company is insistent that _everyone_ use their own internal infrastructure
because they're skeptical of the reliability of others' networks. Of course,
they ignore the fact that their network is terribly unreliable in making this
decision.

------
brown9-2
As someone who has been only a light user of java.net (attempting to checkout
code, navigate source repositories online, etc.) I cannot imagine how anyone
could have much faith that a new architecture for this service would be any
better.

Very odd that the Oracle VP states that in order to remain a part of the "Java
community", Hudson should remain hosted on java.net. There is no way to
quantify this but it seems like a very, very tiny minority of OSS Java
projects use this service for hosting.

~~~
mey
Wonder how Apache feels about not being apart of the Java community.

------
timc3
Want: Github, Git, Google groups. Don't want: Java.net, kenai, Oracle messing
around. Have no problems with: Fork, name change.

Silent "larger community" user has spoken.

~~~
jeremymcanally
I think by "silent larger community" with "dozens" of people, who he's really
talking about is people pay Oracle a _LOT_ of money. Oracle wants these assets
to stay under as much Oracle influence as possible so customers don't go
getting any bright ideas about taking their money or attention elsewhere.

------
gojomo
I'm kind of rooting for a fork, just as a lab of top-down versus developer-
driven progress, with the Oracle version staying on SVN.

Cool names might be 'NortheastPassage' or 'Passage', for the water-navigable
route explorer Henry Hudson sought. Or something based on features near the
Hudson river in New York, like 'Adirondack' or 'Albany'. Or something in
contrast or crossing of the river, like 'EastRiver' or 'GWBridge' or
'HollandTunnel' or 'Verrazano'.

~~~
Tautologistics
If we are talking rivers here then "Rubicon" might be an apt project fork
name.

~~~
markwalling
The Mohawk is a large river that feeds into the Hudson just out side of
Albany. I think we should name it that :)

------
jonursenbach
Is Oracle just actively trying to destroy their acquired assets now?

~~~
hga
Quoting many people, no need to attribute to malice what can be adequately
explained by incompetence.

------
bborud
Fork it and rename it.

Hudson is too important to me, and lots of other developers, to be subject to
the whims of Oracle executives. If ever there was a case where forking is the
most obvious answer, this is it.

As for people who have built a business out of Hudson: "Hudson" is only a name
and if Oracle wants the name, let them have it.

If you rename it I'll do my part in helping with the marketing of the new name
by spreading the word among my peers and I suspect most other Hudson users
would do the same.

------
huherto
How did Oracle got to own this project? I imagine that thru the Sun
acquisition. But, was this a project started/sponsored by Sun. I couldn't find
any information in the hudson site or in the wikipedia page.

~~~
Lewisham
Kohsuke Kawaguchi (the founder/lead dev) used to work for Sun, and developed
Hudson for them. Oracle got Hudson via the acquisition. Kohsuke stayed at
Oracle for a while (longer than some other Sun devs, certainly), then left to
form Infradna instead, providing Hudson consulting.

[1] <http://infradna.com/>

------
binaryfinery
>Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software,

>package hudson;

You might own the trademark Oracle, but you just licensed the use of it to
everyone.

~~~
gxti
"copies of the Software"

Doesn't say anything about the name. Trademark law and copyright law are
related but very distinct. If Oracle owns and enforces the trademark "Hudson"
in the context of continuous integration software, and they say "Stop using
the name Hudson", you must comply regardless of any copyright licensing in
effect.

Compare Firefox which has a free software license but prohibits use of the
Firefox name if any modifications are made to the code. This is why it's
called Iceweasel on Debian -- as I understand it, even a security patch is
technically enough to violate the contract.

~~~
binaryfinery
On the contrary: the software is called "hudson", and the license explicitly
grants the right to deal in the software _without restriction_. Those rights
_include_ the rights to distribute and publish, but "including" doesnt mean
"only". In any case, how would one publish this software without using the
name "hudson"? Does this license imply that prior to publishing the software
we have to replace every instane of the letters h u d s o n with something
else? That would not be "without restriction".

There are several licenses written that say "you may not use our name to
promote your version of the software" or something like that. MIT is not one
of them.

Oracle is welcome to fork it and give it a tougher license. Dont expect it
will see many commits after that tho.

------
shareme
hmm the community should apply some fun and humor..

name the fork SSBounty

------
pkaler
"Oracle in conflict with another open source project?"

I know it is chic to dump on Oracle these days. Can we please get a neutral
title or the same title as the original post? I disagree with the use of the
word "another" and the question mark. A better title would be "Conflict
between Oracle and Hudson project".

EDIT: It looks like Andrew Bayer, a core developer on the Hudson project,
submitted the story. It also looks like any comments calling for reasonable,
rational debate are being down-voted. That's all I'm asking: reasonable,
rationale debate.

It looks like that Oracle doesn't like the way that the project is run and
this isn't an attack on open source. This is a disagreement about how the
project is run. But we can't even have that debate because the topic has been
slanted.

~~~
randylahey
1\. The title is not untrue.

2\. It's not known whether this will lead to a full blown "conflict"
(although, who are we kidding, it probably will)

------
jarpadat
I don't know anything about Hudson. But when I see stories like this (big bad
corporate imposes their will on open source), I always think the drama queens
(on both sides) are busy having "meetings" instead of doing actual work.

Want to fork? Then fork! You don't need anyone's permission. In this day of
DVCS it's about two commands to fork back should relations improve. Using
github is different only in degree, not in kind, from using a different IDE on
your local machine. You don't have to have a holy war about it. If your
development is better as a result you will win, if not you won't. It might be
fun to throw a little tantrum, but it won't make the code any better.

If I'm a developer, especially a developer on a project for which I'm not
getting paid, I'll do the development using whatever the hell tools I want,
thanks. And if someone tells me I can't, frankly, it's not really up to them.

~~~
lrenn
> I don't know anything about Hudson. But when I see stories like this (big
> bad corporate imposes their will on open source), I always think the drama
> queens (on both sides) are busy having "meetings" instead of doing actual
> work.

>If I'm a developer, especially a developer on a project for which I'm not
getting paid, I'll do the development using whatever the hell tools I want,
thanks. And if someone tells me I can't, frankly, it's not really up to them.

This is exactly the position of the Hudson developers, so why call them drama
queens? They can't "just fork it". It's a large open source project with 100+
developers. They need to plan, get consensus, etc. Those "meetings" you seem
to disdain aren't just for people to bitch.

I hope they do change the name and fork it. Oracle needs to learn a lesson
here and they are absolutely powerless (for once) other than having the TM on
Hudson.

~~~
brown9-2
In the email from the Oracle VP, he pretty much invites the developer
community to fork the project under a different name:

 _Because it is open source, we can't stop anybody from forking it. We do
however own the trademark to the name so you cannot use the name outside of
the core community. We acquired that as part of Sun._

The issue though is of course not that cut and dry. The community would want
to think over and debate any such move as it would have a long-term impact on
the overall working relationship with Oracle, Sonatype, other Hudson
contributors/sponsors, etc...

~~~
phaylon
Invitations are usually welcoming. "We can't stop you" doesn't really strike
me as such.

~~~
bphogan
I dunno, maybe I'm reading into this too much, but it almost sounds like a
"hint" so as not to upset others at Oracle. Kinda like "I don't have that
thing you're looking for, but if I did, it would be in my unlocked office in
the third desk drawer on the left. I have to go to lunch now."

~~~
phaylon
I'm not sure I can see that, since the sentence following that quote is »We
hope that everyone working on hudson today will do as they claim to want, and
work with us to make hudson stronger.« This reads quite passive-aggressive to
me, indicating that either you go the Oracle way, or you're clearly not really
interested in bringing the project forward.

And even if the above were a subtle hint intended to be below the Oracle
radar, it would be a suggestion or opinion of a single person, not an
invitation.

~~~
Lewisham
I also read a bit of sarcastic "good luck making a Hudson without the name,
we'll still have it". Presumably there would not be any Oracle changes that
break plug-ins, so a lot of users would have to manually migrate to a fork.
I'm guessing Oracle feels that puts them in a good position.

