Heavy users of the Hudson continuous integration server software are, no doubt, following the community vs. Oracle tussle in the news and blogosphere. Those of you who aren't, may not care. Before I touch on the current state of names and name-calling, let me put in a word of recommendation for Hudson from a pure software-development perspective.

Hudson is a server software stack that provides an environment for continuous integration. We've used it in projects here at the Software Sustainability Institute. Taverna are big Hudson users, and the ADMIRE project at Edinburgh uses it for the automatic build, deploy and test of data integration services across six European sites. We've found it straightforward to install and configure, and an excellent way of keeping an eye on the quality of code going into your project's repository. ADMIRE has Hudson configured to run builds and tests every hour for each of the project sites - ideally giving a sunny weather picture like the one shown on this page. There's even a Hudson interface for iPhone!

If anyone would like the Software Sustainability Institute to write a how-to guide for using Hudson in research projects, do let us know.

Now, on to the politics. Since their acquisition of Sun Microsystems last year, Oracle have been reviewing the T’s and C’s of a number of open-source projects hosted on what was the Sun server infrastructure. This has led to various degrees of consternation within a number of open-source communities – the Hudson community being just one. The outlook for Hudson seems to be fairly clear now. The original project code will be forked, giving us two options: a Hudson continuous integration product, backed by and hosted by Oracle and a Jenkins continuous integration product, backed by the community and hosted by GitHub.
 

News of the changes to Hudson is a little unsettling for those of us who just want to use a solid open-source c.i. platform. It’s anyone’s guess whether both projects succeed or one of them flourishes whilst the other withers and dies. We'll keep an eye on things, and keep everyone up to date on latest developments.