Oracle surrenders Hudson control

Oracle is relinquishing control of the Hudson open source project after a heavy-handed attempt to stay in charge prompted most community members to fork themselves and undermine the project's viability, reports The Register.

The database giant had submitted a proposal to the Eclipse Foundation to create a Hudson project and that it would contribute the existing Hudson core code to the project.

Oracle will transfer the Hudson trademark and Hudson-ci.org domain name to Eclipse and solicit feedback from the Hudson community to “make sure its opinions are heard before any proposal is finalised”.

The project's founder, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, while at Sun, created what is called “a continuous-integration tool” in order to simplify agile Java development, writes InformationWeek.

A continuous integration tool automatically manages all the changes to a software system as it's developed.

Hudson became a Duke's Choice award winner for top Java software at the 2008 JavaOne Conference, and was widely adopted by Java programmers. Kawaguchi still has a claim on some developers' loyalty and they have followed him into his next project, Jenkins.

According to Application Development Trends, the initial project committers will be Tasktop, Sonatype and VMware.

Intuit and IBM are also listed as project supporters on the initial proposal. Oracle expects more companies to commit during the Eclipse Foundation's 30-day review period, said Ted Farrell, chief architect and senior vice-president of Oracle's Tools and Middleware group.