Monday, December 6, 2010

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. !!

2 comments:

Bing AM said...

Remember, Kohsuke was also employed full time by Sun to work on Hudson for a good couple of years, so that means Sun owned some of the intellectual property.

Oracle acquired Sun, as a business, Oracle will assert that IP ownership aggresively. Oracle doesn't get to the Oracle today by having your way of thinking.

I agree that Ted Farrel / Oracle's way of dealing with the community was awful, but as a business, CloudBees / InfraDNA also needs Oracle and a healthy Hudson brand.

Prabhat Jha said...

I understand the business part. But Hudson is not something that was baked inside Sun or Oracle and it's not a typical close source product so it should not be treated as such.