It's official: Hudson has been forked. The "real" Hudson is now called Jenkins. Of course, Oracle will say they've got the "real" Hudson because they've inherited the name. Or, rather, they've sat down upon the name and made it impossible for anyone to pull the project out from under them.

The official word from Oracle, as it were, is really in this email to the Hudson-dev list. Kohsuke Kawaguchi and his posse have moved on to Jenkins, which will not likely push forward with the same frenzied pace that Hudson had.

And this was the real issue for Oracle, I believe: Hudson just moved too fast for enterprises to handle. Oracle is all about updating software, but it tends to do so quarterly, or even less frequently than that. Enterprises are just not able to update their stacks every week as a project moves forward.

This is an understandable desire, but in the end, there was probably a better way to address this problem than an out-right fork. Still, Kohsuke has already accomplished his primary goal: fixing Java builds. Sonatype recently completed a survey of 1000 Java developers, and the results showed Hudson was used by over 80% of them. I can't think of very many open source Java tools projects that have that kind of uptake. Not even Subversion or Eclipse has that level of acceptance.

So while this may look bad, the end result is that the Java build problem has already been fixed. And now, Java developers will be able to choose between two options for handling those builds correctly.