
Oracle forks Jenkins - DanielRibeiro
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=317610
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dmoney
In philosophy this is called the problem of identity over time. A ship is
taken apart, piece by piece. Then the pieces are used to build two separate
ships. One ship has the original nameplate; the other has the original
sailors. Which is the original ship?

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Jach
Non-questions like these are also why a great many people dislike philosophy.

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jerf
I think the error that many people make in holding on to their belief that the
question must have an answer is the fault of those people, not philosophy. How
did you get to the point you can confidently label that a 'non-question' if
you did not consider the problem philosophically?

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Jach
Maybe you consider thinking "What would I anticipate differently depending on
the answer?" when faced with such a question to be a philosophical
consideration, but at that point everything becomes philosophy of some form
and you lose the meaning of the term. ("Everyone philosophizes" is another
such generalization that doesn't help communication.)

The problem with people trying to directly answer such questions (and
questions like the classic tree-falls-in-a-forest one) does come from people,
where else would it come from? But Philosophy as an art (not the general
everything-is-philosophy) encourages these errors by positing the questions
and then leaving them there as "cool mysteries". To carry on a metaphor of
your post's sister, the mind is full of traps that lead to religious thinking,
but Religion does nothing to help avoid those traps and actively encourages
the sloppy thinking that results.

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dmoney
I think it's laymen rather than philosophers that are responsible for things
being left as "cool mysteries." To philosophers, I gather, they're "open
questions," things that either haven't been resolved yet because discourse is
ongoing, or because philosophers have failed to find an answer. Or if they
have been resolved, then they're questions presented by philosophy teachers to
sharpen their students' analytical skills. But the questions rather than the
skills trickle down to non-philosophers.

As a non-philosopher, I do personally like a cool mystery for its own sake,
but my point, I suppose, is that since the question of "which one is the fork"
reduces almost exactly to the Philosophy 101 presentation of the problem of
identity over time, the same framework can be used for analyzing it. If I were
to write a paper on it, my thesis would be that the question of "which one is
the fork" is the result of a bug in the layer of semantics, and so what
actually happens is determined by the lower layers of abstraction: code, law,
and psychology.

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jhonnycano
I think the problem is whether the former Hudson community have a vote against
a company sustaining an open-source project. When company's interests
conflicts with the community ones, which interest will remain? I think the
community decision is a pretty clear statement of what's best for the project.
In a nutshell, we need a project that works for us, not for the company

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joshu
All I hear about Jenkins/Hudson is in the context of this drama. Does anyone
else actually use it?

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autarch
I just set it up to run tests on an app I'm developing after each check in. It
was amazingly easy to get running, and so far it's worked wonderfully.

Amazingly for a Java app, I didn't have to touch a single XML file. Everything
can be configured through the web interface. Fantastic!

~~~
mindcrime
It has a really nice REST API interface as well. One of the ways that API is
expressed is through XML, but there are also JSON and Python versions (yes,
the API sends you Python code in one version!)

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flipdeadshot
How would a client make use of the Python code? By eval'ing it?

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mindcrime
Yeah, exactly. From the docs:

 _Access the same data as Python for Python clients. This can be parsed into
Python object as eval(urllib.urlopen("...").read()) and the resulting object
tree is identical to that of JSON. However, when you do this, beware of the
security implication. If you are connecting to a non-trusted Hudson, the
server can send you malicious Python programs._

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metageek
> _The decision to rename a project is certainly not, in and of itself, a
> fork. Mozilla's web browser went through a couple renames before landing on
> its present name of Firefox._

Bad example, since Firefox _is_ a fork of Mozilla; it started as a stripped-
down version.

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antimora
The author is probably referring to the earlier name Firebird
([http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/firefox-name-
faq.htm...](http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/firefox-name-faq.html)).
Firefox is still a part of Mozilla project.

~~~
cubicle67
For those interested, Firebird is an opensource database based on Borlard's
Interbase.

Back in 2000, Borland (I think they may have been called Inprise at that
stage) decided to opensource Interbase (version 6 I think) , which is where
Firebird comes from. Shortly after, however, Borlard reversed their decision
and took Interbase back in house again. Firebird remained active.

In a previous life I was a Delphi developer, and used Firebird almost
exclusively. It was an amazing database - client server, yet fast with very
small resource requirements and as good as no admin requirements. Set and
forget. I really don't know why it hasn't had more widespread adoption, but
some of the problem seems to be due to lack of good drivers

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vineet
I don't know if I agree with the article.

I am not a fan of the whole Jenkins - Hudson situations. But at the end of the
day Kohsuke was paid to work on Hudson. Oracle clearly owns the Hudson
trademark and the project.

The fact that many in the community felt that Oracle was a bad leader of the
project and therefore wanted to fork it is really besides the point.

Saying that the project was never Oracle's will only make companies want to
support fewer open source projects.

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biot
This title is disingenuous at best, like saying that Oracle has forked MariaDB
or that Debian forked Ubuntu.

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andrewljohnson
His entire point is that it's Oracle being disingenuous here, and the entire
article goes on to explain that reasoning.

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biot
The way I see it is that Oracle is continuing to develop the project under the
Hudson name. The bulk of the community has decided to move the project
elsewhere and continue development under a new name, Jenkins. Fair enough,
they are parting ways.

At this point arguing over who forked who seems (to this outsider) like the
old Reese's commercials arguing whether "you got chocolate on my peanut
butter" or whether "you got peanut butter on my chocolate".

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erikpukinskis
Leerooooooy Jenkins!

