I just read a statement coming from the Hudson development community that there is a plan to essentially fork Hudson into a new project call Jenkins. This is due to Oracle filing trademark requests in both the US and the EU to the name Hudson. Oracle appears to be working openly with the Hudson community to come up with working arrangements. But there is concern that this trademark will always provide a right of refusal to Oracle, a sort of final veto on any big decisions that may oppose the bulk of the community (which mostly work outside of Oracle).

People may think this is just a power battle over a name. But names mean things, and if Oracle can push an entire open source project by threatening to withdraw permission to use the name, then the cause to find a new name is just. My opinion on this subject? I think securing a separate and free name would give the developer community the complete freedom they seek and would serve all of us better in the long run.

But my opinion isn't what's critical. The question is, "how does this affect the recipes in the book that use Hudson?" Probably not much. I say "probably," because all I can do it speculate about the future. To be frank, Hudson is stable and in place and I'm sure Oracle will continue to support their customers. But what about new developers that are just deciding now? What about existing developers that are a bit put off by Oracle's handling of the situation? They may be incited to migrate to Jenkins.

The recipes I wrote for Hudson I'm sure will be completely compatible with Jenkins. There may be changes in text and watermarks, but those are cosmetic. Providing some extra notes indicating that the Hudson recipes probably work with Jenkins as well is what I'm thinking about doing. Since Jenkins may not be available for download in a suitable time frame for drafting and pre-finals, I probably won't be able to have actually run the recipes on Jenkins.

Stay tuned!

UPDATE: The creator of Hudson wrote his own blog entry about the plans to migrate from Hudson to Jenkins.