NewsOracle's Latest Open Source Fumble: The Hudson Project

Oracle’s Latest Open Source Fumble: The Hudson Project

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There’s a lot of friction between Oracle and the many open source projects the company acquired when it purchased Sun Microsystems. Now this week, there’s a dust-up over the open source Hudson project.

InfoWorld’s Savio Rodrigues explains the latest kerfuffle.

The Hudson project hosted its developer and user mailing lists and source code on Java.net. However, downtime and reliability issues at Java.net encouraged the Hudson developer community to propose moving the mailing lists to Google Groups. In parallel, Oracle, also unhappy with reliability issues with Java.net, decided to upgrade the Java.net infrastructure and migrate the Hudson project to the new Java.net infrastructure.

Unfortunately, an Oracle email notifying Hudson users and developers of this migration was not received as the sender was not subscribed to the mailing lists in question. As a result, Hudson developers have been locked out of the mailing lists and unable to access or update the source code for more than a week.

The problem wasn’t solved and so the open source developers proposed moving the project to GitHub. It seemed like a perfect solution until Oracle got wind of the idea. Oracle executive Ted Farrell said “no” to moving to GitHub.

“Because it is open source,” Farrell said, “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.”

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