Jenkins - Hudson Thoughts
There has been a lot of emotion and effort over the past several months regarding the split of Hudson and Jenkins. I obviously have ties to Kohsuke, and tend to side with him on the Jenkins movement. Certainly the general public reaction has been strongly in favor of Jenkins, which is really encouraging.
Stepping back a bit, I think this winds up being a good thing since it has created a sense of competition in the market and made room for two approaches.
Certainly the Jenkins community has a renewed sense of energy from the old Hudson community. The ideas that have emerged over the past couple of months seem to be getting a lot of momentum - improved quality, improved communications, open governance, improved documentation and roadmaps and so forth. It is clear the community is much larger than just Kohsuke. It is also clear that very large users are moving to Jenkins and have confidence in this community.
On the old Hudson side, Oracle and Sonatype have stepped in with a new approach. They have defined their own roadmap and they have their own perspectives on how things should be done. It looks like they will be following a process much closer to Maven. It is kind of a shame that Oracle did not put more resources on the project until this whole upheaval. It is also a shame that Sonatype did not contribute code to the community until they could really control the roadmap.
I think this boils down to two types of approaches to software development and open source. Both approaches have proven successful in the past - no one can argue with the success of Kohsuke's Hudson or Jason's Maven. I tend to like the release early and often and having open communications approach that the Jenkins community is using. In any event, I think users of Jenkins and Hudson will tend to benefit from the increased energy and having a choice. It will be interesting to watch as things unfold.
Stepping back a bit, I think this winds up being a good thing since it has created a sense of competition in the market and made room for two approaches.
Certainly the Jenkins community has a renewed sense of energy from the old Hudson community. The ideas that have emerged over the past couple of months seem to be getting a lot of momentum - improved quality, improved communications, open governance, improved documentation and roadmaps and so forth. It is clear the community is much larger than just Kohsuke. It is also clear that very large users are moving to Jenkins and have confidence in this community.
On the old Hudson side, Oracle and Sonatype have stepped in with a new approach. They have defined their own roadmap and they have their own perspectives on how things should be done. It looks like they will be following a process much closer to Maven. It is kind of a shame that Oracle did not put more resources on the project until this whole upheaval. It is also a shame that Sonatype did not contribute code to the community until they could really control the roadmap.
I think this boils down to two types of approaches to software development and open source. Both approaches have proven successful in the past - no one can argue with the success of Kohsuke's Hudson or Jason's Maven. I tend to like the release early and often and having open communications approach that the Jenkins community is using. In any event, I think users of Jenkins and Hudson will tend to benefit from the increased energy and having a choice. It will be interesting to watch as things unfold.
Comments