Why is this important? Well, this situation has spurned a litany of different questions in my group and makes us take a serious look at what tools we use to make software.
Being part of a large company, we tend to purchase enterprise worthy tools which provide what I call a "throat to choke" in case something goes wrong. We like to deal with vendors who have established support organizations and dedicated customer representatives, so if (actually... when) we have problems with their software, we can grab a hostage/customer rep and make the vendor fix our issues, while the hostage/customer rep buys us lunch/dinner and says compassionate things about our problems.
But sometimes, we go with open source solutions, like Hudson, and build plug-ins or adapters to fit our other tools or processes. Depending on the situation, we will either make those additions available to the community, or we will keep them for our internal use.
So when a proprietary company (i.e. Oracle) eats an Open Source project (i.e. Hudson), it gives us pause because it introduces unknowns, which may or may not affect our work. Things like:
- Why would they want control over a project?
- Will they charge for it in future?
- If we have add-ins we didn't share, do we have to give them to the proprietary company?
- What's up with the legal disclaimer and how does it affect us?
I'm not sure where we are going to go with this, but I sent a note to our legal group asking for an opinion. We will also gather our groups who use Hudson to see what they want to do. Either way, I didn't see this coming, but now that I know what to look for, I'm going to check our other tools to make sure I have a plan if this happens again.
