Oracle is claiming ownership of yet another open-source project. This time, it’s the Hudson project, the popular software build and monitoring service originally developed by Sun Microsystems.

Oracle’s claim over Hudson mirrors it’s earlier claim over the OpenOffice name, as members of that community decided to create new governance around the project.

The catalyst for Oracle’s latest run-in came after Oracle, without warning late last month, locked users out of Hudson. On the morning of November 22, devs could not access the Source Code Repository to commit code, while the Hudson mailing lists were closed.

The shut-down came because Oracle was moving Hudson’s underlying Java.net servers to a new hosting and collaboration platform called Kenai, something it also inherited from Sun.

Among those who found themselves locked out were no less than Hudson’s original creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi, a former Sunoracle employee who left recently to work with start-up CloudBees, along with Oracle’s own chief Hudson maintainer Winston Prakash.

The giant has told users they are welcome to move the service to non-Oracle-owned servers, but if they do so, they can’t call it “Hudson” anymore. Users have already moved code to new servers in an effort to deliver improved service

Hudson is the most widely used integration platforms with more than 25,000 company customers and 290 contributors, according CloudBees, which building a platform-as-a-service for Java apps with Hudson on the back-end.

These are customers that Oracles wants. It wants to tie them to its own developer and tools roadmap. It’s not clear what plans Oracle has for Hudson, but there’s every possibility Oracle would like to have Hudson integrated through Kenai with its own Java IDE and tools JDeveloper.

The full story is available at The Register

You can also follow the time line of events at http://www.hudson-labs.org/content/whos-driving-thing

UPDATE

An updated report from the The Register demonstrates that :

Oracle’s trademark on the popular Hudson open-source project doesn’t exist. At least for now.

Oracle claimed that it acquired the Hudson trademark with its purchase of Sun Microsystems. But a well-placed former Sun Microsystems employee has contacted The Reg to say that Sun took an “explicit decision” not to apply for a trademark on the name Hudson. A search of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s website throws up 623 trademarks for Hudson for many things, but not for the project Oracle owns.

Though the company does not in fact own the trademark, Oracle US recently applied for a trademark in the European Union. A search here reveals that Oracle applied for a trademark on October 29 of this year, just before Hudson users began forking the service by moving it off Oracle-owned hosting servers. It doesn’t seem that the EU has granted Oracle the trademark.