Oracle Plans To Hand Hudson To Eclipse 68
jfruhlinger writes "When Oracle took over Sun, its hamhanded treatment of the open source Hudson continuous integration project, which resulted in a fork, became symbolic of the company's awkward relationship with open source projects. Now Oracle is looking to make amends, or at least get Hudson off its hands, by handing the entire project over to the Eclipse Foundation."
Very Uncharacteristic (Score:4, Interesting)
Why are they trying to make amends? This is Oracle, hasn't splitting communities and driving projects into the ground been working out great for everything they got from Sun?
Re:Sounds good to me (Score:4, Interesting)
Few companies have the capacity to advance open source, and at the same time work for the shareholders. Seems pretty obvious to me that Oracle isn't one of those companies. Maybe they should have looked at Redhat for pointers?
I dont think Oracle was looking to run Sun as an open source business at all. I think they were going to try and monetise their OSS offerings, possibly even close source them from the next version if possible.
What I think Oracle didn't count on was the amount of community support Sun relied on, possibly that was why Sun struggled. Whilst I think that OSS community help is a great thing, you still need a plan to make money as a business and this is quite possible to do without being evil like MS or Oracle or Apple.
Maybe Sun should have taken a few pointers from Red Hat.
Re:Innovation (Score:4, Interesting)
Looking at Oracle handling of Sun assets, it makes me wonder, will we see any innovation from Oracle, or are they going to sit tight on their position and only harvest support licenses?
No flame war here, just wondering with their skills and talent could they bring the IT forward instead of delegating to others?
Skills? Talent? Um, have you seen Oracle's offerings? PL/SQL is at least a decade behind even minor competitors' database offerings, and their tie-in development environments make VB6 look good.. The only thing Oracle is talented at is lock-in and convincing governments and corporations that they need Oracle.
Resiliency of Open Source (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems like they underestimated the open source communities willingness and ability to fork and move on. I noticed a week or so ago that our Hudson server now said "Jenkins" all over it and it's still cranking away. My Natty installation has LibreOffice all over it now, and honestly I can't say I've noticed any difference. In the face of this, it is impossible to "monetize" the product itself--all closing the source accomplishes is the exclusion of community contributions. Maybe they're finally getting it.
Then again, Hudson/Jenkins are kind of niche products ... how many people would actually pay for a continuous build service whose core functionality comes from the underlying build system (Maven and Sonar)?
What will be interesting is to see if the open source projects go back to the former branding once the projects are given back. If not, then that would kind of send a symbolic message that the original project died at the hands of Oracle and that its too late for amends.
The point? (Score:4, Interesting)
What was the point of buying Sun again? Aside from the hardware, the whole company was built around open source software. It doesn't matter if we're talking about Java, Solaris, MySQL or OpenOffice or a smaller project. If Oracle can't figure out how to handle open source, they wasted their money.
They've already scared developers away from Java. It's only going to get worse.