Thoughts on recent Hudson trademark issues

Recently I have seen several tweets and blogs on forking Hudson and I also come across this article on how Oracle is trying to assert its trademark on Hudson. This trademark thing simply disgusts me to say the least.

I have been involved with Hudson from very early days and I think my first post to Hudson's user mailing list was in early 2007 and I even wrote a little portlet that aggregated data from Hudson. I am not a kind of guy who tries to get his head around copyright issues and different OSS licenses but I always understood that

• Hudson started as Kohsuke Kawaguchi's pet project and he worked on top of his regular day job
• Kohsuke did and still does an awesome job of being involved with community and as a result got several committers and plugin developers
• Hudson got popular enough that Sun thought it deserved Kohsuke's full attention and they also started selling support for it.

So more or less Hudson has been a perfect example of OSS where both project and community have had mutual relationship. Why would anyone want to impose a trademark on it? Oracle has been in news mainly for bad reasons among java community and this simply asserts why java community does not trust Oracle to be a good steward for Java. Leave Hudson as it is Oracle and start working with community, not against it. !!