After recent disagreements between Oracle from one side and Hudson creators and open community on the other, the latter decided that Hudson was to be forked and become Jenkins CI. More details can be found here and here.
Now Jenkins CI has got a life of his own and so does Hudson. However, while the former is the continuation of the original Hudson open source project, under the original creator and towards an open-source future (at least we think), the latter is now under Oracle's wing with more structure around it. Oracle realised the commercial opportunity that the vast Hudson user base represented; so did Sonatype which has started to work towards a professional (e.g. commercial) version of Hudson, to be targeted to enterprises with over 1,000 employees. The webinar in which Sonatype explains its roadmap for Hudson can be found here (the link is active at the time of writing).
Sonatype intends to do with Hudson what it has already done with Nexus, with the difference that Hudson was not an invention of Sonatype. My question is: should Sonatype have invested in Jenkins CI over Hudson? It is true that Hudson might have more enterprise focus because of Oracle's support, but at the same time it appears as if the original Hudson users are moving towards Jenkins CI. In the end, migrating to Jenkins CI from Hudson might be as simple as switching and renaming a war file.
Why didn't Sonatype choose Jenkins CI over Hudson? My view is that the choice was not dictated by professional or technical reasons, but rather by bad timing.
What would happen to Hudson, and by reflection to Hudson professional, if the majority of users moved to Jenkins CI?
Of the two runners, my view is that Jenkins CI will win the competition over Hudson and my reasons are simple: Jenkins CI lives in the original spirit which originated Hudson; the creator of Hudson, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, is the leader of the new Jenkins CI movement; finally, the activity around the new Jenkins CI seems frantic, at least judging by the posts on Twitter and the blogs out there.
Happy technology.
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