Open-source forkers declare Oracle independence

Opensourcers running a popular code management project have declared independence from Oracle by voting to fork rather than leave the giant in charge. Community members of Hudson have voted by 214 to 14 to keep the Hudson mailing list and archive on Google Groups and source code on GitHub servers. An interim governance board …

[Will Godfrey]

Oh dear, oh dear

Poor little arrogant, abusive multinational. I'd weep for you... only I can't stop laughing.

[Mikel]

Good

When the last good free software project escapes from Uncle Larry, the world will be a better place.

[Matt Bryant]

RE: Good

I'm not so sure. Oracle used to have a pretty good rep for playing well with the FOSS community (well, compared to other ubercorporations anyway), I'm left wondering why there has been such a steep decline in the relationship since the Sun purchase. It could be two things; either the old Sun projects were basically running so wild as to be unpalatable to the Oracle machine, or the management given the job of borging them into the Oracle whole has just been really poor. I suspect a combination of both factors.

[MacroRodent]

New situation revealed lack of understanding

Before the Sun acquisition, Oracle did not have major open-source projects. I think it had some, but they were fairly little-known geek stuff, flying under the corporate radar. Then it obtained several of the most visible projects at one stroke, and apparently was simply not ready to handle them correctly! Oracle does not understand that heavy-handed assimilation just does not work with open-sourcers, who can easily go elsewhere if they are unhappy.

[Anonymous Coward]

the lawyers

I suspect the main things that are running wild are the Lawyers. And of course, they have been given free reign because of the sun aquasition.

Too much that goes on business these days seems to end up pointing there.

[Antony Riley]

Rewriting History.

I'm sorry.

"Oracle used to have a pretty good rep for playing well with the FOSS community."

Give me some of what you are smoking, they've been pretty much universally despised in the FOSS community for as long as I can remember, almost as much as Microsoft.

Searching for old blog posts regarding Oracle's acquisitions of InnoDB and Sleepycat in 2006 will make it quite clear that even back then nobody in the FOSS community trusted Oracle.

[Anonymous Coward]

How to lose friends and alienate people

New book out now by Larry Ellison!

[Jeff 11]

Larry's Lessons In Life, cont.

13) People tend not to stick around you when you put price tags on their children.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually,

Oracle now owns the trademark in the US (they applied for it during the conflict), see:

http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4003:b5a12u.2.14

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Actually

It's not worth the filing fee now.

[Robert Moore]

Only one left.

When will they get to VirtualBox?

Oracle has achieved what even Microsoft has been unable to do. Become the recipient of my complete and utter contempt.

[Oninoshiko]

Good luck.

I've had some exchanges with Kohsuke Kawaguchi, and used some to the supporting libraries he has written for Hudson (I suppose I have to get used to calling it Jenkins now). He's a good guy, I wish him the best of luck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apologies if you've heard this one before...

...but what the fork?

[Anonymous Coward]

Summary of events

1 Oracle buys Sun

2 <project> unhappy with some minutiae

3 Oracle says, "Hey, we paid good money for you people, do as you're told".

4 <project> says, "F*** **u".

[Eugene Crosser]

"Fork" vs. "Rename"

Whether the event qualifies as a "fork" in its essence is an open question, but I think the author should have at least mentioned that the people who initiated it preferred to call it a "rename" rather than a "fork".

[Anomalous Cowherd]

hudson-ci.org is not new

<nitpick>It has been the domain for the project for a long time</nitpick>

I suppose I'll have to rename my CI virtual machine now. Damn you, Oracle, for your intransigence!

[blofse]

Anyone got a complete list of all the latest forks?

So Oracle has lost openOffice and hudson recently but in a step to try and keep myself up - are there any are the other forks we should all know about? Is there a complete and official list?

For e.g. mysql has been forked many times all with slightly different purposes. I would like to know if this has since been forked with the original purpose still in mind (i.e. an official fork with the same team of people that started the whole thing).

Java has forked but I am confused as to which version is like an official.

So basically if there is a list of the following tech and what they have or are turning into that would be very useful!

Mysql > ? MariaDB?

Husdon > Jenkins

Java > OpenJDK?

VirtualBox (worried about this one - it's a great bit of kit) > ?

Glassfish > ?

OpenSolaris (I think this is dead but please update me) > ?

Any others???

[Oninoshiko]

not complete, but if you are compiling a list....

> Mysql > ? MariaDB?

Maria has been around longer then the Oracle sellout, I think (although i might be mistaken). IIRC wasn't his complaint be that the GPL is too restrictive to boot? I'm really not expecting wide-spread usage of Maria.

> Husdon > Jenkins

Yep.

> Java > OpenJDK?

Isn't Oracle a prt of OJDK? yep! A quick look it's even hosted on java.net. It seems to be a play to kill Harmony.

http://openjdk.java.net/

> VirtualBox (worried about this one - it's a great bit of kit) > ?

I am not aware of a fork/rename here, I dont think they have been given a reason to yet.

> Glassfish > ?

No clue.

> OpenSolaris (I think this is dead but please update me) > ?

Nope, development contenues in a set of projects. OS/Net has been forked into Illumos, which is not intended to be a full OS. A number of distros are filling that gap (migrating to the Illumos version of OS/Net) OpenIndiana seems to be the most notable.

> Any others???

[blofse]

nice info - thanks

cheers for your reply Oninoshiko, very helpful indeed.