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Sonatype Supports Hudson's Move to the Eclipse Foundation

Written by Jason van Zyl | May 04, 2011

At Sonatype, we're very excited about the Hudson proposal that has been posted to the Eclipse Foundation website today. We believe Hudson moving to the Eclipse Foundation is the best way forward for both the Hudson and Jenkins projects. Having Hudson at a mature OSS foundation like Eclipse gives enterprise users the confidence that Hudson will remain vibrant and continue to grow, and provides an opportunity to reconnect the Jenkins and Hudson communities back into a single focused community. Sonatype supports Eclipse as a Strategic Member because the infrastructure, process impressed us, and approach to project oversight. It's an ideal place for Hudson to mature.

Looking at the interested parties in the Hudson proposal, it's apparent that more resources than ever will be poured into the Hudson project. Oracle and Sonatype have been working diligently to add fundamental architectural improvements to Hudson, which has paved the way for a new stream of innovation. VMware and Tasktop have also indicated they will provide additional development resources, and we're keen to start collaborating with them.

Sonatype also hopes to attract more enterprise-class contributors by taking the lead and contributing our core Hudson innovations to Eclipse. This includes all the Maven 3.x integration that we have created to date. We originally only will provide a portion of our Maven 3.x integration to the OSS community, but we are so excited about Hudson moving to Eclipse that we want to stimulate community adoption and wider participation by providing the best Maven integration possible.

The Hudson proposal still needs to go through the 30-day review period within the Eclipse community, but we think Hudson has found its new home. The Eclipse Foundation is a highly respected organization, has proven vendor neutral, and has fostered many successful projects. Eclipse would be a great place for Hudson and Jenkins to reunite, and now would be an ideal time. It can only be a good thing for users, and I sincerely hope the Jenkins team will seriously consider this option.

Hudson plays a key role in Sonatype's commercial product portfolio, so we're committed to making the project succeed at Eclipse. We will offer commercial support and value added functionality in our "Professional" version of Hudson. We plan to contribute all commercial work we've invested in the Hudson project, but we have more commercial features in the pipeline. Our customers tell us that Hudson is a critical part of their software development infrastructure, along with Apache Maven, Nexus, and m2eclipse. Hudson will be successful at the Eclipse Foundation, and Sonatype plans to take active part in that success.