How to choose between Hudson and Jenkins? [closed]

Question

It took me an hour or so to work out Hudson has only branched recently (Jan/2011)
I have no idea how rapid the change of each branch is now, but more importantly, what is the direction each branch is taking and what are key points so one could make a choice between which to go with?

Anybody have links to product roadmap and feature differences?

Answer 1

Use Jenkins.

Jenkins is the recent fork by the core developers of Hudson. To understand why, you need to know the history of the project. It was originally open source and supported by Sun. Like much of what Sun did, it was fairly open, but there was a bit of benign neglect. The source, trackers, website, etc. were hosted by Sun on their relatively closed java.net platform.

Then Oracle bought Sun. For various reasons Oracle has not been shy about leveraging what it perceives as its assets. Those include some control over the logistic platform of Hudson, and particularly control over the Hudson name. Many users and contributors weren't comfortable with that and decided to leave.

So it comes down to what Hudson vs Jenkins offers. Both Oracle's Hudson and Jenkins have the code. Hudson has Oracle and Sonatype's corporate support and the brand. Jenkins has most of the core developers, the community, and (so far) much more actual work.

Read that post I linked up top, then read the rest of these in chronological order. For balance you can read the Hudson/Oracle take on it. It's pretty clear to me who is playing defensive and who has real intentions for the project.

Answer 2

As chmullig wrote, use Jenkins. Some additional points:

• In fact, arguably it was Oracle who did the forking! And technically, too, that's kinda what happened.

• It's interesting to see what comes out of "Hudson" though. While the "Winston summarizes the state and rosy future of the Hudson project" stuff they posted on the (new) Hudson website originally seemed like odd humour to me, perhaps this was a purposeful takeover, and the Sonatype guys actually have some big ideas up their sleeve. This analysis, suggesting a deliberate strategy by Oracle/Sonatype to oust Kohsuke and crew to create a more "enterprisy" Hudson is a very interesting read!

• In any case, this brief comparison a fortnight after the split—while not exactly scientific—shows Jenkins to be by far more active of the two projects.

...and a little background info:

The creator of Hudson, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, started the project on his free time, even if he was working for Sun Microsystems and later paid by them to develop it further. As @erickson noted at another SO question,

[Hudson/Jenkins] is the product of a single genius intellect—Kohsuke Kawaguchi. Because of that, it's consistent, coherent, and rock solid.

After the acquisition by Oracle, Kohsuke didn't hang around for long (^{due to lack of monitors...? ;-]}), and went to work for CloudBees. What started in late 2010 as conflict over tools between the dev community and Oracle and ended in the rename/fork/split is well documented in the links chmullig provided. To me, that whole conundrum speaks, perhaps more than anything else, to Oracle's utter inability or unwillingness to sponsor an open-source project in a way that keeps all parties (Oracle, developers, users) happy. It's not in their DNA or something, as we've seen in other cases too.

Given all of the above, I would personally follow Kohsuke and other core developers in this matter, and go with Jenkins.