Oracle "sanitizes" Hudson's creator from wiki

http://jenkins.361315.n4.nabble.com/Hudson-Dev-Can-I-get-my-account-back-td3262992.html

by recampbell • 15 years ago

171 56 15 years ago

jenkins.361315.n4.nabble.com

jarin• 15 years ago

Ah yes, Oracle is carrying on the grand tradition of Pharaohs, ancient Rome's damnatio memoriae, and Stalin's Great Purge.

w1ntermute• 15 years ago

This shouldn't be surprising at this point. Everyone should know by now that Oracle doesn't give two fucks about anything other than making money.

ShabbyDoo2• 15 years ago

I happy that Oracle's goal is to make money, but they seem to only care about doing so in the short term. How much goodwill has Oracle blown with influential technical folk over what is really a very minor piece of software in the grand scheme of things? How much harder will it be for Oracle to promote a new technology/standard/whatever if the first thing everyone's thinking is "How are they going to screw me?"

rst• 15 years ago

Oracle believes they aren't selling to technical staff, but to non-technical management, and their sales processes are built around that belief. So far, it's working for them.

samt4• 15 years ago

This is what I do not get about Oracle. Are we (tech influencers, i guess) all commie hippies that can't make a damn difference at all to their long term business?

Because the answer is either yes or no, and if there is a good possibility that it is no (Oracle's behavior is long term financially detrimental) you might think shareholders would care. But I do not see $ORCL shareholders marching in the street in protest about the apparent pillaging of the company's future. Where are the pitchforks?

newobj• 15 years ago

Considering that the person who responded to Kohsuke is Jason van Zyl, creater of Maven, and not an Oracle employee as far as I know, I have to question the title of this story.

gojomo• 15 years ago

It appears van Zyl is with Sonatype, a company working with Oracle to continue Hudson under its original name:

http://www.sonatype.com/people/2011/02/hudsons-bright-future...

rdtsc6• 15 years ago

Fantastic excerpt from it

----

The Hudson lead, Winston Prakash from Oracle, is highly skilled, very thoughtful, and he cares about the community. He is also the first person to create detailed, comprehensive architectural documentation.

----

So now the main accomplishment of the current project lead is writing detailed documentation. Those that can - code, those that can't - write very detailed documentation. Yeah, I think I'll stick with Jenkins...

brown9-22• 15 years ago

See this recent Sonatype blog post for more background: http://www.sonatype.com/people/2011/02/hudsons-bright-future...

IMO, it sounds like Sonatype (which was already bundling a version of Hudson in their premium product) sees this recent fork as an opportunity to ramp up their contribution to the "offical" Hudson project and take some control.

raganwald• 15 years ago

Sure, I can fix it. I wanted to catch up with you on IM as we'd like to regain access to the hudson-labs infrastructure as well. There are a few other VMs we're not sure exactly where they are.

Do I read this as, "We deliberately locked you out and removed your attribution, and we hint we can fix things, and we want you to do certain things for us, but no we aren't actually saying we'll fix anything and no we didn't tell you about it in advance?"

Really, I would just walk away from anyone trying to deal with me on this basis. Come out and say what you did and what you're going to do. If you need my help with something, ask, and don't try to hint things are tied together when they aren't.

fierarul• 15 years ago

I've been following a bit the Hudson debacle and I'm not surprised things are tense there, especially after the new fork.

But I do not think it's as simple as it seems and blaming everything on Oracle's "native evilness" is a bit naive. Quite the contrary, I'm starting to get the feeling that the 'community' might have been played a bit and all the Oracle bashing used as a trampoline for the fork.

Take this message for example: why did Kohsuke feel the need to post this publicly? He left Sun/Oracle, just had closed negotiations between Oracle and his new employer Cloudbees regarding Hudson (done while working at Sun) and recently got "the community" to vote on a fork. He certainly has enough detail contacts to resolve this privately if needed, so why would he choose to post this publicly?

But yeah, the reply in itself couldn't have been more insinuating.

rdtsc6• 15 years ago

> Really, I would just walk away from anyone trying to deal with me on this basis.

Agreed, with one exception -- to expose the other side to the public. I think Oracle is showing its face (again) and I think it is in the community's interest to _let_ it keep showing its face.

j_baker3• 15 years ago

No. If he had started something about Oracle, what would have happened to Oracle? Some redditors and HNers would seize the opportunity to complain about how horrible Oracle is and then everyone would forget about it a few days later. On the other hand, what would have happened to Kawaguchi? Some potential employer could see him complaining publicly about one of his former employers and decide that it's a bad idea to hire him.

In all, there's little good that would come out of it and a ton of risk for Kawaguchi.

j_baker3• 15 years ago

I read it more as being a mistake on Oracle's part and van Zyl expecting some kind of quid pro quo to fix it. I don't think van Zyl actually caused this or anything. It seems to me to be more indicative of van Zyl being an opportunist trying to get something out of fixing a mistake. After all, if this were some kind of diabolical plot, you'd imagine that van Zyl would ask for more than the location of some servers.

UPDATE: According to tweets in another comment, I'm wrong and van Zyl did cause this. I'm still inclined to attribute this to incompetence rather than malice though.

chc2• 15 years ago

I'm confused. Based on the second entry in the thread, it sounds like it was just a mistake. Am I missing something?

kenneth_reitz• 15 years ago

The response is bringing that into question. It sounds like Oracle is holding his account hostage.

rbanffy3• 15 years ago

Why would Oracle keep his account with full functionality after he left the company, badmouthed it, and started a fork of the product the company paid him to develop?

I agree removing his name was dumb, but it could be an unpredicted side effect of modifying the account.

Stormbringer• 15 years ago

If you are familiar with ESR's writings you will know that the primary motivator of a lot of people writing code in the gift economy is recognition.

When it comes to recognition and proper attribution therefore, there are no 'just mistakes'. It is like if you go on holiday and come back to find that the bank has misplaced all of your money, foreclosed on your mortgage and now there are a bunch of smelly windows developers living in what used to be your house.

... and when you go to complain to the bank they say "I don't see why you're so upset, it was just a mistake"...

... except that, in this case, every time you ask the bank to put it right and give you your house back, the bank is saying "sure, no problem, but can we talk about you doing us a little favour first?"

----

I won't apologise for the extremity of the above dramatisation either - stealing someone's credit is just about the worst crime in open source.

rch3• 15 years ago

If this was just an honest mistake, the response should have been worded differently.

At this point, perhaps the account problem could be fixed immediately, and then a separate discussion started to address the hudson-labs issue. To do otherwise seems unnecessarily infantile.

rch3• 15 years ago

...assuming there really is any 'issue' on either side here, that is.

rch3• 15 years ago

...and reading through things, I guess there is. Awful.

donohoe• 15 years ago

I agree... Until there is another follow-up post then it's very ambiguous.

Bobbickel• 15 years ago

The original thread http://jenkins.361315.n4.nabble.com/Hudson-Dev-Can-I-get-my-...

brown9-22• 15 years ago

Some recent tweets from Jazon van Zyl make it sound like he's holding Kosuke's request hostage:

This wasn't anyone at Oracle. It was me after a preliminary infrastructure audit, it's not malicious or permanent. http://twitter.com/#!/jvanzyl/status/34413629902168064

This is my request to @kohsukekawa (http://bit.ly/fXsvd7) to air everything in a conversation that everyone can see http://twitter.com/#!/jvanzyl/status/34413629902168064

So in other words... let's have an IM chat for questions I have about the core architecture of a project you built, and then I'll restore your account?

othermaciej• 15 years ago

His second reply on the thread sounds even more like he's holding the account hostage:

http://jenkins.361315.n4.nabble.com/Hudson-Dev-Can-I-get-my-...

escanda• 15 years ago

The removal was done by a Sonatype employee; company which could be potentially more vulnerable to this tactics as their products are subject to be chosen by developers. I would think twice before buying them a product after this.

quicksilver03• 15 years ago

Since Sonatype's offering is centered around Maven, you should think twice regardless of this issue and then look for something better (gradle or buildr, for example, or the old reliable ant).

Oracle "sanitizes" Hudson's creator from wiki

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