January 11, 2011

Kohsuke Kawaguchi renames Hudson to Jenkins

Kohsuke Kawaguchi led the HudsonAn early Java continuous-integration server — forked into Jenkins after a trademark dispute. community to rename the project Jenkins on January 11, 2011 — breaking from Oracle's trademark control after the SunSun Microsystems — maker of Java, Solaris, and SPARC; acquired by Oracle in 2010. acquisitionOne company buying another — a common path for tech giants to absorb products and talent..

What it was for

Kohsuke KawaguchiThe HudsonAn early Java continuous-integration server — forked into Jenkins after a trademark dispute.→Jenkins fork preserved the world's most widely used CI server as community-governed software. Jenkins became the default build automationUsing machines or software to perform tasks with minimal human intervention. tool in JavaA portable language running on the JVM — dominant in enterprise servers, Android, and big data. shops and later across polyglot pipelines.

People

  • Kohsuke Kawaguchimaintainer

Why it's here

The Jenkins rename was a landmark open-source governance fight with Oracle.

Why it mattered

It kept continuous integration tooling under community control when trademark disputes threatened the project.

What it solved

Oracle's HudsonAn early Java continuous-integration server — forked into Jenkins after a trademark dispute. trademark claims put the project's name and infrastructure at corporate risk.

Media

  • Kohsuke Kawaguchi
    ImageKohsuke Kawaguchi

    The Jenkins project (http://jenkins-ci.org/), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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