Maybe you haven’t heard yet (where have you been!), but Hudson, the Continuous Integration server, is being renamed to Jenkins.

Sacha Labourey sheds a bit of light on the background that motivates the changes, but let’s just say that the community wants to move in a direction that Oracle is against, and Oracle claims the ownership of the Hudson trademark, so the community decides to move the source code to another hosting and use a different name for this fork.

So you have on one side Oracle, which AFAIK is doing few contributions to the project, and most of the people doing actual contributions on the other side.

Now, playing devil’s advocate, what if Oracle decides to continue Hudson, by, for instance, just merging all changes to Jenkins back into Hudson. No non-Oracle committers, a bit of development on their side if needed, just a close copy of Jenkins, but with the Hudson brand.

Would that succeed?

Of course you know that the community-endorsed project is now Jenkins. How many people out there would know that too?

Would current users in big corporations be aware of the status of the project?

Would it be possible for a giant like Oracle to use its marketing machinery to promote Hudson as an Oracle product and build some Hudson-branded products on top by just owning the trademark?

Could somebody pull a trick on the open source world as Eddie Murphy does in The Distinguished Gentleman? Vote for Jeff Johnson, the name you know!

I would hope that’s not the case, specially because Hudson doesn’t seem to play a big role in Oracle product map, but if it were otherways… I wouldn’t be so sure.