1.4. From Hudson to Jenkins—A Short History

Jenkins is the result of one visionary developer, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, who started the project as a hobby project under the name of Hudson in late 2004 whilst working at Sun. As Hudson evolved over the years, it was adopted by more and more teams within Sun for their own projects. By early 2008, Sun recognized the quality and value of the tool, and ask Kohsuke to work on Hudson full-time, starting to provide professional services and support around Hudson. By 2010, Hudson had become the leading Continuous Integration solution with a market share of over 70%.

In 2009, Oracle purchased Sun. Towards the end of 2010, tensions arose between the Hudson developer community and Oracle, initially triggered by problems with the Java.net infrastructure, and aggravated by issues related to Oracle’s claim to the Hudson trademark. These tensions also reflected strong underlying disagreements about the way the project was being managed by Oracle. Indeed, Oracle wanted to move towards a more strictly controlled development process with a slower release schedule, whereas most of the core Hudson developers, led by Kohsuke, preferred to continue with the open, flexible, and fast-paced community-focused model that had worked so well for Hudson in the past.