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Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing?
It would seem that there is a brewing conflict between the development community for Hudson, which is an open source continuous integration server, and Oracle, who own the trademark to the name, over where the code and development infrastructure will be hosted. Over at the Hudson Labs blog, R. Tyler Croy lays out a timeline of the disagreement, along with some of his opinion of what's going on. "The fundamental issue here is that the developers want to make a change in how they contribute to Hudson, and have made their voices heard to that end. From the users' perspective, such a change would have literally zero impact on them, which makes Oracle's conflation of the two sides of Hudson particularly frustrating." (Thanks to Croy and Christof Damian for bringing it to our attention).
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Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 2, 2010 23:06 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
Summary: yet another open source project about to fork off Oracle.
Found this gem in the blog comments:
> Large companies with Procurement Directors and such have trouble negotiating with Oracle, and that's from a position of strength (as a customer).
Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 2, 2010 23:29 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The only person in that comment thread who recommended *against* forking was working for Oracle.
(Mind you... only a few days' downtime and they yell fork? SourceForge was much more unreliable than that for years...)
Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 3, 2010 10:35 UTC (Fri) by oblio (guest, #33465) [Link]
It's a "Continuous Integration" server. I mean, wouldn't it be ironic? :)
Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 3, 2010 12:18 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] It sounds more like Oracle is telling the entire development community "If you try to run this project yourselves we will fork it." I can't imagine any scenario in which an Oracle fork surpasses the project version. Can the name really mean that much?
Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 3, 2010 5:08 UTC (Fri) by karath (subscriber, #19025) [Link]
And now it is alleged that Oracle do not own the trademark, see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/03/oracle_doesnt_own...
Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 3, 2010 5:17 UTC (Fri) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
This article makes a bogus claim based on the fact that Oracle may not have registered the trademark. However the law, in the US at least, does not require trademarks to be registered to be valid.
Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 4, 2010 7:01 UTC (Sat) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]
You may have confused copyright law with trademark law. A copyright does not have to be registered to have strong protections, but as far as I can see an unregistered trademark has very little protection, "limited to the geographic area in which the mark is actually being used". And "Hudson" is not a particularly distinctive or unique mark, rather it is a common proper noun. Of course I am not a lawyer, make of it what you will.
Even though I think Oracle is in a weak position with its trademark claims, I also think the project name is the least important aspect of a project. Who cares about Ethereal now that the Wireshark rules the world? I seriously doubt that Oracle's bespoke 9 to 5ers can outcode the community. If history proves me wrong then more power to them, and thanks for the fish.
Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 4, 2010 15:08 UTC (Sat) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link] I also think the project name is the least important aspect of a project.I very much agree. Changing the name of a forked project has the added benefit of disassociating with any possibly bad history. At best, you eclipse the original project, and at worst you're just forgotten. Musicians can have the same issues, fighting over a band name when they split apart. There certainly can be value to names, but I often wonder why people that do great things can't simply do something greater, and leave the past behind.
Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 3, 2010 9:08 UTC (Fri) by jpnp (subscriber, #63341) [Link]
In years to come, Oracle are going to be a huge case study in how not to manage open source projects. They inherited so many from Sun, and, by all appearances, are managing to alienate each community in turn.
Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 4, 2010 23:11 UTC (Sat) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]
Hopefully Oracle cares that this is the current perception. If they do care, I don't imagine they're dense enough to avoid taking steps to correct the perception. I imagine they're big and slow, and change takes time.
The other possibility is that they're moving toward becoming hostile to Free Software. This was the case with SCO, lets hope Oracle sobers up.
Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 5, 2010 20:30 UTC (Sun) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link] Hopefully Oracle cares that this is the current perceptionI seriously doubt that. It is more likely that Larry Ellison et al regard continued participation in open source projects a necessary evil at best, something to be dispensed with as soon as a good excuse can be made to do so, because proprietary software is far more profitable for them. I hardly need recite evidence is support of that claim.
Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 3, 2010 10:31 UTC (Fri) by oblio (guest, #33465) [Link]
It seems kind of stupid from Oracle to mess up the wonderful community built around Hudson.
Hudson provides a nice infrastructure piece and is one of the few free (as in "free beer") solutions competing with powerful commercial solutions. Do they want to kill it or control it? Either way, they lose money:
Despite its large collection of bugs, Hudson is quite a nice tool. And it is maturing slowly - many of the major features are already there. Why would you want to mess up something like this?
Beats me.
Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 5, 2010 5:38 UTC (Sun) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]
Oracle's behaviour would tend to suggest they'd rather have 100% of a market that's a tenth of the size than 20% of the 10x larger one.
Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 3, 2010 15:25 UTC (Fri) by KGranade (guest, #56052) [Link] > Posted Dec 3, 2010 5:17 UTC (Fri) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]> In years to come, Oracle are going to be a huge case study in how not to > manage open source projects. They inherited so many from Sun, and, by all > appearances, are managing to alienate each community in turn. I don't think you're giving them nearly enough credit here. I'm sure they're working on alienating all of the communities simultaneously, but the effort is just coming to fruition at different rates.
Hudson Labs: Who's driving this thing? Posted Dec 3, 2010 21:18 UTC (Fri) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
I believe you miss attributed that quote to me:
>> Posted Dec 3, 2010 5:17 UTC (Fri) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
when it should likely have been:
> Posted Dec 3, 2010 9:08 UTC (Fri) by jpnp (subscriber, #63341) [ http://lwn.net/Articles/418550/ ]
Is this the line for Oracle bashing? Is it my turn already? Posted Dec 3, 2010 22:13 UTC (Fri) by utoddl (subscriber, #1232) [Link] I shouldn't pile on, but...how's this for a new company slogan for Oracle: Do Only Evil.(If only it were a joke, it might be funny.)
Is this the line for Oracle bashing? Is it my turn already? Posted Dec 4, 2010 0:39 UTC (Sat) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]
Or just "Be Evil"
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