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Java Open Source Oracle

Oracle Plans To Hand Hudson To Eclipse 68

Posted by samzenpus from the here-you-go dept.
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."
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Oracle Plans To Hand Hudson To Eclipse More

Oracle Plans To Hand Hudson To Eclipse

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  • Sounds good to me (Score:3)

    by Runaway1956 ( 1322357 ) on Thursday May 05, 2011 @07:15AM (#36033800) Homepage Journal

    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?

    • When they looked at Red Hat, they saw a distro that they wanted, so copied it, before ruining it and pretending it was theirs. OK, so they weren't actually pretending it was theirs, they were more pretending that it was any good!

    • Re:Sounds good to me (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Thursday May 05, 2011 @07:34AM (#36033894)

      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: (Score:2)

        by hoggoth ( 414195 )

        > evil like MS or Oracle or Apple

        Updating my scorecard...

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          While you're updating, remember to move Apple ahead of MS and put Oracle at the top. If you've ever had to deal with Oracle licensing, you'd understand they're more even than Apple and MS combined.

      • What I think Oracle didn't count on was the amount of community support Sun relied on

        Except for the fact that Sun's OSS projects were primarily developed in house by its own employees?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by McLoud ( 92118 )

      And while at it, look around for other opensource projects on their hand that they can't handle it themselves and work out the issue BEFORE another fork happens wasting everyone else's time

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Meski ( 774546 )
      Instead of SCO

  • Very Uncharacteristic (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bsharitt ( 580506 ) <bridget&sharitt,com> on Thursday May 05, 2011 @07:17AM (#36033812) Journal

    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: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      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?

      Looks like the purchase of Sun is going quite as planned. Goes to show just how much community support Sun relied on. If they were planning to monetise open source, they did it in the most pants on head retarded way possible.

    • Normally when one company buys a troubled company it is usually because they can see a plan to make it profitable again. The buying company can see a lot of the waste that is going on that people on the inside couldn't see (often because they were the benefactors of the waste). After they buy them they work to clear out the waste and get the company back to profitable again.

  • Innovation (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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?

    • Re:Innovation (Score:4, Interesting)

      by spiffmastercow ( 1001386 ) on Thursday May 05, 2011 @07:38AM (#36033920)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Will agree on PL/SQL. I work in an Oracle shop and write in it, and it has got to be one of the most feature barren languages I've ever used.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bberens ( 965711 )
        Until alternatives win those contracts and perform Oracle is still going to be able to say they run the largest and most important databases in the world. Banks, governments, really almost everything of the utmost national and international importance runs Oracle in some fashion on the back-end. Sure, Amazon uses their own proprietary data store for their internet facing site, but all the back-office stuff is Oracle, etc. etc. I like PostgreSQL as much as the next guy and I use it whenever I'm allowed, b

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by swilver ( 617741 )

          You mean Oracle has proven that is a bloated piece of 1970's code that needs handholding at every turn? Even behind fat abstraction layers Oracle manages to leak through and annoy everyone with its ridiculous restrictions and stupid optimizer decisions. Oracle is like x86's; but atleast those were actually improved over the years and eventually became a fairly nice and modern architecture.

          It's abundantly clear they donot care, as long as they can sell expensive support contracts and bill you by the CPU.

          Or

          • Re:Innovation (Score:4, Informative)

            by spiffmastercow ( 1001386 ) on Thursday May 05, 2011 @09:08AM (#36034732)

            It's abundantly clear they donot care, as long as they can sell expensive support contracts and bill you by the CPU.

            I'd go one step further and say that they intentionally avoid updating their software. The more difficult their software is to use, the more consultants they can charge for. First they get you by the balls, then they squeeze.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by bberens ( 965711 )
            I never argued that Oracle is technically better than any of the alternatives. I said the alternatives have not won the contracts that have allowed them to prove themselves. It's as simple as that.

  • I doubt it's altruism (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ilsaloving ( 1534307 ) on Thursday May 05, 2011 @07:35AM (#36033900)

    Most likely they just couldn't monetize it, so they don't want to be responsible for it either.

    • It's simple. If they have had a true change of heart, they will stop trying to sue competitors for using Java, and we should welcome them as a new ally. If they are just trying to distract us from making noise about that, then they will continue making token concessions in insignificant areas without ever backing down where it counts. There is no need to be cynical about this token concession--all will be revealed soon enough.

  • Resiliency of Open Source (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CynicTheHedgehog ( 261139 ) on Thursday May 05, 2011 @08:13AM (#36034202) Homepage

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Svartalf ( 2997 )

      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.

      Seems to have happened that way at least once with LibreOffice.

  • The point? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by laffer1 ( 701823 ) <luke@nospAM.foolishgames.com> on Thursday May 05, 2011 @08:35AM (#36034366) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The point is the hardware. Oracle can sell a an integrated hardware/software solution, and doesn't need to involve HP or IBM for its big steel.

    • They got Java, if they figure out they can squeeze money out of something else that will just be an added bonus.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Teckla ( 630646 )

        They got Java, if they figure out they can squeeze money out of something else that will just be an added bonus.

        How can Oracle monetize Java, enough to make the mammoth purchase price of Sun worth it?

        Serious question.

        • As far as I can tell, Oracle bought Sun to get hold of Java. The reason seems to be not to make money from Java, but to make sure they have control of a critical piece of software. Oracle has a massive investment in Java, and could you imagine how screwed they would have been if someone like Microsoft had bought Sun?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          How can Oracle monetize Java, enough to make the mammoth purchase price of Sun worth it?

          J2SE and J2EE are pretty much free, but J2ME's still got lots of money in it. Only J2SE/J2EE's pretty much free (though you can bet J2EE's going to have tons of Oracle support), but J2ME's widely deployed and heavily licensed.

          You see, all those dumbphones and featurephones with JVMs in them have J2ME licenses in them that contribute a not-insignicant amount of patent licensing fees back to Sun/Oracle, hence Oracle's laws

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Adayse ( 1983650 )

      The point was to have the most pretentious name unchallenged. How can buying that be a waste a money?

  • Historical Quote (Score:3)

    by arthurpaliden ( 939626 ) on Thursday May 05, 2011 @08:56AM (#36034610)
    "Oracle works best in a 35mm slide presentation."
    Unknown
  • I haven't been following the Hudson/Jenkins saga *that* closely, but it was my understanding that most of the developers that had been working on Hudson had moved over to Jenkins and that Hudson itself had basically been left behind in the dust. Even if Hudson gets moved to the EF, will anybody care?
  • Is it just me, or is the ITworld LIVE feature of their web site one of the most annoying features ever? Many web sites have a section that provides links to other recent articles, but this one lists new users joining the site, and responses in forums, and other seemingly unrelated activity that has occurred in the last day. And instead of just putting a list on the page, or putting it in a box you can scroll to see it all, they put it in some sort of box that scrolls all the time. This makes it look like it

  • Taking a *FAST* look at the linked articles and Google it wasn't clear what the Hudson project is making. What is the Hudson project making?

    • A continuous integration build management system. Compile code on commit, run tests, send emails to people when things fail, handle dependencies between build artifacts and all that. The kind of thing that people used to have to build on top of make 15 years ago, and used to require entire teams of people to maintain and operate.

      • So, it does what ANT does ( plus a few more thing ) for the Java world?

        Thanks hibiki_r

        • ( plus a few more thing )

          While you probably "could" build a Hudson type system using Ant, Hudson is not ANT ++. It can use ANT to build and run tests, but can also use any number of other tools. Continuous build management systems are an invaluable addition to a developers workflow. If you're developing Java then Hudson/Jenkins is well worth looking into.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by sitkill ( 893183 )
            this x 10

            Most notably, if you have different environments with different build, different servers, different svn locations, etc, etc etc. If you have a continuous build system and haven't looked at Hudson, I'd highly recommend it.
            • CI systems also provide a handy central location to track all SW dev activity for all projects. You can tie all different dev platforms (Linux, Mac, Win, etc) to Jenkins and see build stats for everything in real time. Build node fail overs are automatically handled if you have a cloud of connected build servers so hardware problems are removed from causing any interruption to your SW deployment. Even if the underlying tasks are accomplished on the individual machines by Ant, MSBuild, windows .bat, there
        • That's a bit of an over-simplification! If you do use Ant, Hudson/Jenkins will make use of your Ant build (you'll continue to have an Ant build).
          But it's much more than that - It keeps track of the builds done for projects, tracks the resulting jars and wars are used in other projects. You can easily see things like "Who ran the build?", "When?", "What code was changed in such-and-such project?" long after builds were done.
          We've been using Hudson (we'll probably soon switch to the Jenkins fork) for
  • Actually, Oracle has donated some project to Open Source community... Yes those are not successful projects, but this is not the first time Oracle do things like this. Examples include EclipseLink, Toplink Essentials (these are essentially the same thing), Apache Trinidad...
  • The oldest and most crucial team members left and started the Jenkins fork of Hudson. I read this as Oracle panicking they have no one capable of maintaining Hudson, so have given up on it as an Oracle product.

  • Larry: "Can we make money from it RIGHT NOW?"
    advisor: "No sir. Maybe in a few..."
    Larry: "Get it the FUCK OUT OF MY COMPANY!"

    This appears to be how Oracle has dealt with every developmental project from Sun, not just open source.

  • The Jenkins fork essentially made this a non-event. Here at work we have been using Hudson on Ubuntu. After an apt-get upgrade, Hudson is now Jenkins on our system. The only pain point was the change from /var/lib/hudson to /var/lib/jenkins.

    Oracle needs to learn that in the Java world, communities and personalities matter more than corporate branding. Most don't know Hudson as the CI project from Sun, they know it as the easy to use CI project created by Kohsuke Kawaguchi [java.net] while working at Sun. Java i

  • Oracle is, as usual, too late. I operate a large Hudson cluster for a top 5 tech company (dozens of build nodes, quartets of backup servers, big SAN storage for all the artifacts) and we immediately jumped on Jenkins and have no plans of looking back at Hudson no matter who runs it. We are sticking with where ever Kawaguchi takes this project, as are most of Hudson's users. Given that some of our engineer's revisions and new features have been or are being rolled into Jenkins, we are not going to be woo

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