The Hudson back story

Hudson was created by Kohsuke Kawaguchi at Sun Microsystems as an open source continuous integration server and had its first release in February 2005. By 2008, Hudson had started to become a popular alternative to other continuous integration servers and won a Duke's Choice Award in the Developer Solutions category at Java One in May 2008.

Oracle completed the acquisition of Sun Microsystems on January 27, 2010, which included ownership of the Hudson trademark and its intellectual property. Disagreements between Oracle and Kohsuke and other project contributors over project infrastructure and trademark control began in November 2010 and ended in February 2011 with the renaming (forking) of the Hudson project to a new project named Jenkins.

Oracle and its partners have continued the development of Hudson, while Kohsuke and other project contributors continue work on the separate Jenkins project.

In May 2011, Oracle began the process of transferring the Hudson project and trademarks to the Eclipse Foundation. The Hudson project was moved to the Eclipse Foundation and became a full Eclipse project on December 12, 2012 with the release of Hudson 3.0.0.