Episode IV: A new Home
Jenkins has a long community history. Started as Hudson, project had to rename as Jenkins to escape trademark usage threat at the time Oracle acquired Sun. At this time, community was nervous with such a move, wondering if users would migrate, know the new name, understand the move, etc. But things went very fast, and community ended being stronger than ever.
As an open-source community project, Jenkins needed some legal identity to avoid comparable issues to happen again. Software in the public interest non-profit organization gracefully hosted Jenkins project since 2011. This allowed Jenkins project to create a healthy and independent community. But at same time, SPI was not equipped to manage legal contacts, managing recurring costs, raising money, etc.
Also, the heavy involvement of CloudBees in Jenkins sometimes brings the wrong perception project is owned by CloudBees, whenever statistics demonstrate many companies and individual contributors. Jenkins needs a clearer identity and governance model as an open-source community project.
Continuous Delivery definitively is a hot topic. New products, modern practices, integrations, are announced by many actors of this creative ecosystem. Advanced techniques like “Progressive Delivery”, which would have been Sci-Fi some years ago, can be fully automated today with some bits of kubernetes-voodoo.
Something very comparable happened few years ago with the Container ecosystem : dozen actors where innovating in this area, creating a fast moving ecosystem. They joined forced by creating the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which has grown into a major organization hosting most promising projects and organizing major events. The open collaboration that such a foundation allows has been a major reason for Kubernetes large adoption.
“By bringing together the open source community’s very best talent and code in a neutral and collaborative forum, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation aims to advance the state of the art of application development at Internet scale.”
-- Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation
What if we could reproduce this model ?
This week is very exciting for Jenkins project, because this is the public announcement of the Continuous Delivery Foundation
Continuous Delivery Foundation has been created to offer a neutral and solid home to host major CI/CD solutions and services, encouraging actors to collaborate and build the next generation of tooling in this area. This is a vendor-neutral foundation, with well established governance rules, under Linux Foundation umbrella.
CD Foundation is the new home of Jenkins and Jenkins X projects, as well as Tekton from Google and Spinnaker by Netflix. All those project will benefit an open governance within the foundation and opportunities for more collaborations. Typically, CloudBees already is working with Google on using Tekton within Jenkins X.
The very first CDF summit will take place the day before KubeCon Barcelona, I’ll be there and happy to talk if you want to share your thoughts on this new Home for the Jenkins project.