With nearly 19,000 active instances of Nexus around the world, we thought we would reach out and ask the community to share their Nexus stories and experiences with us. Over the last six weeks we held our Nexus Stories Contest and we were blown away by the tremendous response we received from around the globe.

Thank you to all of you who took the time to participate. We hope you are all enjoying your wicked awesome Nexus mugs! As promised, we will be sharing your Nexus stories on our blog over the coming weeks.

After the overwhelming response we received, we decided drawing one grand prize winner just wasn’t good enough (plus we love to take advantage of Jason every chance we get). So we decided to draw three grand prize winners!  Our three lucky winners will each be receiving one day of onsite consulting with Jason van Zyl. Our grand prize winners are:

• Alexis Morelle, Colombes, France
• Rueben Jimenez, San Francisco, CA
• Henry Hughes, Los Angeles, CA

Congratulations to our winners and thanks again to everyone who participated!

Stay tuned next week, when we will be sharing some of your stories on what life was like, before Nexus.

ReadWriteWeb’s Joe Brockmeier has an interesting piece analyzing OpenStack Essex, while this isn’t an exact overlap with the kind of analysis we’re working on for Insight and Nexus, it’s a view into the social and open source dynamics of a project.

Brockmeier’s article is a summary of some analysis that OpenStack contributor Mark McLoughlin assembled from commits and Gerrit code reviews. It’s a breakdown of activity by organization, as with many open source projects that have corporate involvement, there’s always one or two companies that tend to dominate the commit breakdown.

Where the article is a little off-base is in the assessment of community health, you can’t judge the “health” of an open source project by the mix of companies represented in a commit breakdown alone. It’s an interesting statistic, but there’s so much more to open source than code commits including documentation efforts, marketing spend by companies invested in a project, and financial support for essential efforts not directly related to code (legal, infrastructure, etc.). Open source isn’t about code alone, and while it is an ideal for open source projects with corporate involvement to have balance, this balance can shift over time.

As Sonatype comes to market with more tools focused on helping you make better decisions about the components you use, we’re going to focus first on “actionable” metrics like popularity and quality. While these sorts of metrics are interesting (and you can get them from Eclipse BTW, if you go to this page), I don’t think it makes sense to create arbitrary, commit-based assessments about the health of a community.

I don’t think it would ever make sense to have a “Warning Project dominated by one corporation” flag, because I predict you’d end up seeing this flag on just about every open source project out there. It’s a subjective measure, and while these numbers may suggest that Rackspace is dominating the codebase of OpenStack, they may also just suggest that Rackspace has created a solid framework for a maturing community.

Cloud as the New OSS Battleground: Permissive vs. Copyleft

These open source cloud platforms (OpenStack and Eucalyptus among others) are the current battleground for computing. There’s a massive amount of investment and attention being paid to cloud computing, and as a result, there’s also a large amount of investment being poured into sponsored open source development. With CloudStack recently moving to the Apache Software Foundation and Eucalyptus recently signing agreements with Amazon to ensure AWS compatibility, there are weekly strategic moves from companies like Oracle, RedHat, Citrix, Amazon, VMWare, IBM, Intel, Appfrog, EngineYard….. (I’m going to stop because I could fill up several pages).

One of the big stories over the last week was Eucalytpus’ embrace of GPL versus CloudStack’s embrace of the ASL. Whatever your views on open source and licensing, it’s important to note that OSS licensing issues are front and center with commentators writing reams of analysis about how Cloud will eventually turn into a battle between permissive licensing models and GPL licensing models.

One thing is certain, people are paying attention to licensing issues like they never have before. If you haven’t yet done so, you should start too. Downloading a copy of Nexus are start getting a sense of your OSS license usage.

I’m pleased to share the results of this year’s Sonatype Open Source Software Development Survey.  We were blown away by the level of participation — more than 2,550 of you took the survey.

Thank you to all of you who contributed your thoughts about your tooling, the components you use, and your organizations’ open source policies (and how you feel about them).    There results are extremely interesting.

Take a look for yourself  (best viewed in  ‘full screen’ mode), let us know what you think, and share with your friends and colleagues.

For those of you who would prefer our survey results as a PDF, here they are: Sonatype Survey Findings

Sonatype makes it easy to add your projects to the Central Repository with a free, public hosting service called OSSRH, that we recently wrote about here.  Many developers have found this a very useful service and easy to use with Apache Maven.  However, if you’ve started using Gradle, you may have wondered if you could continue using the service.  The answer is absolutely YES.

We were talking about creating a guide for this, but someone in the community beat us to it.  Yennick Trevels published an excellent guide in his blog that you can find here.  We highly recommend checking out his post if you want to use Gradle to deploy artifacts to the Central Repository.

Open source software emerges when people work in unison to create something greater than any one of them could create on their own. While the result may always be a collective work, the contributions and sacrifices that make a project thrive are always individual. These contributions deserve recognition. Sonatype will be paying tribute to the members of the Java open source community, who dedicate themselves to improving these projects. We’ll do so by featuring them in our new Community Spotlight each month. This month’s spotlight is on Manfred Moser of simpligility technologies.

If there is someone you would like to nominate for the community spotlight, please don’t hesitate to contact us at communityspotlight@sonatype.com. Thank you!

Manfred Moser – Kicking Apps and Taking Names

We have had the pleasure of working directly with Manfred Moser for the better part of a year and have been familiar with his work for much longer. Given Manfred’s constant and continuous work with the community we are sure many of you know him but for those that don’t, here is a little bit of background on Manfred.

Manfred has been professionally developing software in Java since 2003 and is a self-proclaimed open source fanatic, as well as an Android application developer, consultant, author and speaker. He has a long history of developing software in Internet, enterprise and mobile spaces. He is now working as an Android application developer and consultant with his own company, simpligility technologies.

simpligility technologies brings simplicity and agility to software development, processes, products and customers. With Manfred’s engineering background, teaching experience and passion for tools and infrastructure, he loves helping and mentoring other developers and development teams. He is able to understand complex requirements, business processes and software systems and cut through all the distractions to the core purpose and aim of an application. With this background simpligility offers a myriad of helpful consulting services.

We have been very lucky to work with Manfred on a number of projects. He is a core committer to the Android Maven Plugin and has co-authored our Sonatype book Maven: The Complete Reference, where he recently revamped the Maven Android chapter.  He is a Hudson committer and co-authored the new Hudson Book with Tim O’Brien.  Manfred is also a core contributor to our brand new Nexus Best Practices training course materials.

Manfred is the founder of the Vancouver Island Java User Group in Victoria, BC and in addition to presenting at java user group meetings, he has also presented at a number of conferences around the world. His next appearance will be at AnDevCon II in San Francisco this week from November 6 to 9, 2011.  If you plan to be there, we highly recommend popping into at least one of his sessions. The two sessions Manfred will be leading are: Taking Advantage of Apache Maven for Your Android Builds and Testing Android Apps – Going from Zero to Hero.

You can follow Manfred on twitter @simpligility or read the simpligility blog here.

We would like to thank Manfred for all his hard work and contributions! Thank you Manfred!

Open source software emerges when people work in unison to create something greater than any one of them could create on their own. While the result may always be a collective work, the contributions and sacrifices that make a project thrive are always individual. These contributions deserve recognition. Sonatype will be paying tribute to the members of the Java open source community, who dedicate themselves to improving these projects. We’ll do so by featuring them in our new Community Spotlight each month. This month’s spotlight is on Anders Hammar of Devoteam Sweden.

If there is someone you would like to nominate for the community spotlight, please don’t hesitate to contact us at communityspotlight@sonatype.com. Thank you!

It Takes a Village…and Anders Hammar

We have been very lucky to work directly with Anders for a number of years now and we can confidently say he is one of the most seasoned Apache Maven experts and evangelists that we know.  We are sure many of you know him, but for those that don’t–here is a little bit of background on Anders.

Anders is a software architect and CTO of Devoteam Sweden, a Certified Sonatype Partner in Stockholm, Sweden. He’s been working professionally with Java for more than ten years.  For the last four years he has focused on Maven,  providing support, consulting and training. Anders works with development organizations to help them adopt and customize their use of Maven and Sonatype Nexus to set up a strong development infrastructure that allows them to build better software, faster.

Being a true believer of open source, Anders is active in several open source projects including Codehaus Mojo, Codehaus Cargo and the Apache Maven Project. Anders takes pride in giving back to the projects he uses in his professional work. It is not uncommon to find him giving a talk or tutorial on Maven or Nexus at conferences like Jfokus or Oredev. Lucky for us, he’s also one of the primary authors of the Sonatype Book Repository Management with Nexus and a contributing author to the rest of our Sonatype Books.

A personal note from Tim O’Brien on Anders: “Anders has been quietly and continuously contributing to all of our Sonatype books over the past few years, and he’s a big reason why you don’t have to suffer through all of my typos and misspellings.“

If you are located in Europe and are looking for Maven or Nexus consulting or training don’t hesitate to contact Devoteam Sweden. Under the leadership of Anders they can offer you the in-depth technical knowledge to help you get started with implementing a Maven or Nexus environment or improving an existing one with customizations.

We would like to thank Anders for all his hard work and contributions! Thank you Anders!

Sonatype is happy to announce a brand new webinar taking place in July: Select Better Components with New Eclipse Plugin.

After this webinar you will have the knowledge and tools you need to quickly and safely incorporate components into your projects. And as a bonus, when you participate in this webinar you will be one of the first to download the free public beta of the initial release of Sonatype Development Insight for Eclipse!

Webinar details:

• Date: Thursday, July 21, 2011
• Time: 10:30AM EDT (UTC/GMT-0400)
• Presenter: Brian Fox, Sonatype Vice President of Engineering

Produce higher quality code using the enhanced quality, security, and license data provided by the Sonatype Development Insight plugin for Eclipse. In this webinar you will learn how Development Insight for Eclipse will help you:

• Determine when new component versions are available and whether or not to upgrade
• Understand what versions of each component are used in your project
• Identify where a specific component is used
• Choose components that meet your quality, security and licensing standards

Register today!

Catch up on the latest news and product releases from the Sonatype team, with our June 2011 Newsletter. In this issue, Hudson moves to Eclipse, enhancements to Nexus, and June training dates for Maven 101 and 201 open for registration.

Hudson: Move to Eclipse, Sonatype donates enhancements, and more

• Oracle announces Hudson move to Eclipse Foundation Oracle plans to contribute the Hudson core code to the Eclipse Foundation. Read Jason van Zyl’s blog or the stories in ADT, eWEEK, and SD Times.

• Sonatype donates enhancements We will contribute our Maven 3.x integration work to the Eclipse Foundation. Watch this community demonstration of the new features. Read more about our contribution in Application Development Trends.

• Sonatype launches Sonatype Pro™ for Hudson See our website for more details.

• Hudson Survey Sonatype and Oracle surveyed over 1,200 Hudson users to see what they’d like to see in future versions. The majority of respondents considered reliability and performance to be most important enhancements. Read a summary blog post or get the full details in this presentation.

Nexus News:  Enterprise Enhancements Coming Soon

We’ve been hard at work on Nexus too – not just Hudson.

• Enterprise Enhancements Our users tell us they want improved enterprise features. Centralized repository management ranks at the top, followed closely by high availability.  We will start rolling out these features this summer, beginning with centralized management. Watch this blog for more details. To try early releases or provide feedback to our engineering team, email us.

• Nexus 1.9.1 We released the latest version of Nexus last month with lots of important, under-the-hood changes.  For the full story check out Brian Fox’s blog post.

• New name You may have noticed that the professional, supported version of Nexus has a new name – Sonatype Pro for Nexus. Only the name has changed, everything else is exactly the same.

Sonatype Training: MVN-101 & MVN-201

Learn the know-how and best practices directly from Apache Maven and Nexus experts.

Upcoming Training Classes:

MVN-101: Maven Mechanics – 1 day virtual class Enrollment fee: $595 USD MVN-101 Maven Mechanics comprehensively covers Apache Maven installation and configuration, explains the motivation behind Maven and gives an overview of related development tools. Learn more.

Upcoming MVN-101 Classes Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 9:00AM – 4:00PM CEST (UTC/GMT + 0200) Monday, June 27, 2011, 11:AM-7:00PM EDT (UTC/GMT – 0400)

MVN-201 Development Infrastructure Design – 1 day virtual class Enrollment fee: $795 USD MVN-201 Development Infrastructure Design covers advanced Apache Maven topics and provides expertise with the structure of a Maven POM and a Maven multi-module project. Learn more.

Upcoming MVN-201 Class Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 11:00AM – 7:00PM EDT (UTC/GMT – 0400)

Follow Sonatype on Twitter

If you want to get updates from the Sonatype team the moment news breaks, follow us on Twitter @SonatypeCM.

If you would like to join our mailing list, you can subscribe here.

Are you headed to EclipseCon 2011? It’s not too late to make plans to head to Santa Clara, California in March.

EclipseCon is the conference for anyone involved in Eclipse. As a proud member of the Eclipse Foundation, Sonatype is looking forward to another year of great talks, tutorials and BOF’s. We will be hosting a number of talks in the Cypress Room all day on Tuesday, March 22, 2011.

Sonatype founder Jason van Zyl will be giving a presentation on Building Eclipse plugins and RCP applications with Tycho, Nexus & Hudson.

Event details:

• Date: March 21-24, 2011
• Location: Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, CA
• Event website: http://www.eclipsecon.org/2011/

Stay tuned to the Sonatype blog for updates on Sonatype’s talks and presentations at EclipseCon 2011. And for the latest news and updates from the Sonatype team, follow us on Twitter @SonatypeCM.

We believe that Hudson users can look forward to a long, bright future.

Working with the community, Oracle and Sonatype are each putting a number of full-time engineering resources on Hudson. 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.

This kind of documentation (which has never been available in the past) is required to understand how Hudson can be improved. The lack of architectural documentation, along with how decisions were made, left the Hudson community mostly dependent on a single individual for core changes.   Let’s be honest about where this led:

• The Hudson WAR distribution incorporates over 100 dependencies, a troubling number of which are forked.   As result, there is no easy way to incorporate improvements from those forked projects in Hudson. It’s also not very easy to know why they were forked in the first place.

• The core technology for the user interface in Hudson is Jelly. We used Jelly in Maven 1.0, but took it out more than five years ago for Maven 2.x because it is not maintained and very difficult to work with. Hudson is still dependent on Jelly, but there are many more standard, and flexible, options for the UI technology: choices like GWT, Vaadin, or JSF.

• Hudson has had minimal project infrastructure. There are extremely limited unit tests, and integration tests that leave a lot to be desired (e.g. they don’t run on recent versions of the Mac OS X). Weekly builds of Hudson without a sophisticated automated test infrastructure is just not wise. Winston and I will propose a plan to clean up some of the testing infrastructure as a first priority. We’re not in a rush to push out releases where the community has to act as QA. It’s great to get feedback from users but we think a better job can be done on the testing front to alleviate this burden on users. It’s not glamorous, it takes a lot of time, but it’s necessary if you value stability and quality.

• Little to no effort has been made to track the provenance of the code, and there are numerous licenses that are used throughout the codebase. The licensing issues can likely be resolved using different libraries, and doing some modularization, but the provenance and IP issues are of utmost importance when you care about downstream consumers. These issues are of little or no concern for SaaS providers, but critical for companies that need to deliver software used on-premise.

So, I’ve told our developers to stay focused on improving Hudson’s infrastructure and fundamentals. Here’s our current work log:

• Testing infrastructure, and bolster the unit and integration tests
• JSR330 support for plugins
• JAXRS support for web services
• Maven 3.x support (94% of Hudson installs also use the Maven plugin)
• Eclipse integration
• Netbeans integration
• Assessment of the current Hudson architecture
• JSR330 architecture work to modularize the Hudson core
• Using a standard view technology like GWT, Vaadin, or JSF
• Inspection of non-standard/forked dependencies and trying to re-align with current mainstream releases
• Isolating code with problematic licenses and trying to reduce the license footprint
• Using standard Maven plugins for creating ancillary Hudson distributions

I’ll describe all of this in greater detail in subsequent blog posts.