Life at Eclipse

Today’s announcement that Oracle is proposing to move the Hudson project to the Eclipse Foundation is big news. It’s news because of the popularity of the project, its history and, let’s face it, the Hudson/Jenkins fork that happened a few months back.

One of the key issues that split the Hudson/Jenkins community was how to balance the corporate and community aspects of the Hudson project. Kudos to Oracle for continuing to work on these issues and make, what I believe is the right move for Oracle and for the Hudson community.

By moving the Hudson project to the Eclipse Foundation, Hudson will now be operating in a vendor-neutral, transparent, and not-for-profit organization. This means potential contributors will no longer be required to sign an Oracle contribution license agreement to contribute code. In fact, Eclipse allows you to keep the copyright to your code; the code you contribute remains yours, licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). Furthermore, the Hudson trademark will now be owned by the Eclipse Foundation and held in trust for the benefit of the entire community rather than any particular company. So if you’ve been wary of participating in Hudson because of “trust issues”, the Eclipse model of collaborative development should make things a lot easier. Hudson will now be a truly community-based project.

Oracle has certainly taken some lumps for their handling of open source communities, hopefully they will get the kudos they deserve in this case. In particular, I would like to point out the effort that they have put into seeking the collaboration and support of Sonatype, Tasktop, VMware, Intuit and IBM. Eclipse Hudson is showing immediate signs of growth and diversity.

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 proposal is now available for review. I’d encourage everyone to provide feedback and welcome Hudson into the Eclipse community.