Destroying the village in order to save it is a cliche of war, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has always seen business in that context.
With the move of Hudson to Eclipse, he demonstrates his loyalty to the paradigm.
Just as with OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice, Ellison waited until developers had forked the project, and gotten comfortable in their new home, before deciding the "community" should control the code base. In this case, the fork is called Jenkins-CI.
In case you're wondering, Hudson and Jenkins provide continuous integration (CI) of Java projects, and monitor execution of jobs created with Java. This makes Java more attractive to large enterprises.
The distinction this time is that Hudson is going to the Eclipse Foundation, but that's a distinction without a difference. The plain fact is, Hudson is going under the thumb of a collection of corporations — VMWare, Sonatype, Tasktop, as well as Oracle.
Ordinary people, real community members, are not welcome. Oracle did not talk to any of the former developers, including Kohsuke Kawagachi, before announcing the move.
This had to be deliberate, and bodes ill for attempts to re-unify Java, the other big project Oracle inherited with Sun. Oracle blew up developer relationships there so that Apache left the Java Community Process, and Oracle has made no move to bring things back together. (Note that it deliberately moved Hudson to Eclipse and apparently never talked to the Apache Foundation.)
Once may be an accident. Twice is a trend. Three times it's a pattern, a strategic choice.
Oracle is determined that corporations, or groups of corporations, will run its open source projects, and that community — ordinary developers supporting a project for motives other than profit — will gain no purchase. If they stay with the project they're under a corporate head, if they fork they're on their own, and Oracle cares nothing about the fate of the code base under a fork. Cross it, in other words, and they'll crush you, just as if you quit a proprietary company and had to leave your code behind.
Eclipse head Mike Milinkovich insisted in a blog post addressed to Kawagachi that he's no Oracle tool, and that he wants to bring the two groups together, but it's doubtful Oracle would allow that under any conditions other than its own.
The hope is time will heal wounds, but indications I get from Apache members is that it won't. Oracle would rather blow up projects than see real communities drive them. It is, in my opinion, a fascist mindset.
publication decisions are based on prestige. I remember conversing with an articles editor from a very highly placed journal. She expressed annoyance that the article needed a great deal of work in the concluding half (she repeated this twice for emphasis), and that the board hadn’t noticed this upon acceptance because it had only gone through half of it. I’ve also spoken former articles editors, from very highly ranked journals, who said they dealt with volume by simply dumping a third or half of the submissions into the garbage without reading them. Another articles editor, at a very highly ranked journal, told me the method that year’s board used for identifying articles was asking each other whether they had heard of the authors name, if they did they read it if not the piece had no chance. And I have many more stories.
publication decisions are based on prestige. I remember conversing with an articles editor from a very highly placed journal. She expressed annoyance that the article needed a great deal of work in the concluding half (she repeated this twice for emphasis), and that the board hadn’t noticed this upon acceptance because it had only gone through half of it. I’ve also spoken former articles editors, from very highly ranked journals, who said they dealt with volume by simply dumping a third or half of the submissions into the garbage without reading them. Another articles editor, at a very highly ranked journal, told me the method that year’s board used for identifying articles was asking each other whether they had heard of the authors name, if they did they read it if not the piece had no chance. And I have many more stories.
I start to type this with tears in my eyes Christy – congratulations to you and Nick, you both deserve to walk proud with your heads held so HIGH!! I can’t believe its been 7 years already- I remember standing in the hallway at PNA with all staff surrounded in one big group as we bowed our heads in prayer for Elias’ health and also strenth for you and Nick…AMAZING!!! He was no bigger than a ruler then, and look at him climbing mountains now! WOW – I really can’t say anything else, except
I start to type this with tears in my eyes Christy – congratulations to you and Nick, you both deserve to walk proud with your heads held so HIGH!! I can’t believe its been 7 years already- I remember standing in the hallway at PNA with all staff surrounded in one big group as we bowed our heads in prayer for Elias’ health and also strenth for you and Nick…AMAZING!!! He was no bigger than a ruler then, and look at him climbing mountains now! WOW – I really can’t say anything else, except