On Oracle proposal about Hudson

Oracle posted their proposal on the future of the Hudson project here (the cached version is here and here in case it changes.)

In this proposal, Oracle has not shifted at all from their original position that resulted in the community posting the proposal to rename. It’ll keep all the rights on the trademark Hudson, and it will continue to collect CLA from the core contributors. The proposal includes a clarified fair use policy to derivative work, but it doesn’t include any provisions about how the project can continue to use its name in the future, which was the central issue.

I think the message is quite clear, that Oracle intends to change the way the project is run, and that they are driving the effort unilaterally. You can see it in the proposal itself:

As many of you have pointed out, there can be a fork at any time. If Oracle ever did anything that the community disagreed with, whether it was enforcing new rights on the Hudson name, or trying to muscle the community, the community could always fork at that point in time. That is one of the assurances against a corporation doing things like that. … There are many ways to run an open source project. I think in order for Hudson to grow and reach more people the core community needs to grow and become more open and equal.

Notice that in their eyes, what happened in the past two months is not something “that the community disagreed with”, and putting a stop to a well agreed GitHub migration is not “trying to muscle the community.”

In my opinion, their proposal reinforced that our concerns were legitimate and what we feared is already happening. If the outcry from the community didn’t win any compromise from Oracle, I honestly don’t know what will. This is precisely why we need to rename now, and not later. If this isn’t enough for us to be resolute, then we’ll be divided and conquered through a series of highly technical confrontations that cannot rally a larger community, the community gets gradually boiled to death like a frog.

This “our way or highway” theme can be seen in many places throughout our conversation. They are going to dictate their will on us, when they contribute less than 1% of commits since I left Oracle. They think they have a proven record of leading open-source projects, when the record shows otherwise.

Since their position hasn’t changed, I continue to stand behind our earlier proposal to rename. That is,

  1. We rename the project to Jenkins. We’ll trademark the name, and transfer that to the umbrella of the Software Freedom Conservancy, to ensure that the owner of the key assets cannot use that to unfairly influence the project.
  2. For core, we’ll also start collecting CLA assignable to SFC for the same reason, when we are admitted to SFC.
  3. Grant the trademark usage in the same way the Linux trademark is handled.
  4. We’ll foster the same open atmosphere that we always had, where everyone is a committer just by asking (plus CLA for core), proposals are discussed on their technical merits and not by the title of the proposer, inputs from plugin contributors are valued, and the consensus of the community trumps any single entity.
  5. We’ll put an interim governance board in place, until the governance structure is secured and hold an election of the board members. I suggest myself, Andrew and, if Oracle elects to remain involved, Winston Prakash, the Oracle engineer working on Hudson, be the interim board members.
  6. We’ll move our infrastructure off from Oracle-owned servers and for other infra resources that are hosted elsewhere, such as GitHub and Google Groups, we’ll rename them for Jenkins.

Now that we know all the options on the table, I believe Andrew will get a vote going soon. Please help us with your support. To borrow a line from a movie I recently watched, “when bullies rise up, the rest of us have to beat them back down.”

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