Author Archives: Wayne Jackson

The Next Step in Transforming Software Development


September 19, 2011 By Wayne Jackson

Today we announced Sonatype Insight™, a new product line designed to help application development organizations gain better visibility and control over their use of open source components.

This is an exciting step in the evolution of Sonatype.

From our early beginnings with the Apache Maven project, to our leadership on such key projects as Nexus, m2eclipse, Hudson, p2 and Tycho, and through our stewardship of the Central Repository, we’ve always been committed to transforming software development through the use of open source.

What’s next?  How do we ensure the continued successful adoption and growth of open source in software development?  How do we help balance the beneficial economics, efficiency, and quality of open source with legitimate management concerns about quality, security, and licensing?

This challenge led us to build Insight. Insight lets developers leverage open source freely while reducing unnecessary risks.  It provides visibility and control without bureaucracy.  It enables governance without burden. In short, it’s a product suite that we, as developers, would be pleased to have in our environment.

Feedback from our pre-release customers has been very positive.  They see what we see – organizations need actionable information without disrupting their development processes.  They want to use more open source, but must avoid quality, security, and licensing risks.  They need productivity, not bureaucracy, manual research, and rework.

We’re excited about Insight and about our continued commitment to open source.  I’d encourage you to learn more at www.sonatype.com/insight or to contact me at wayne@sonatype.com if you have questions.

 

Our Focus on Advancing Hudson and Making Great Software


February 1, 2011 By Wayne Jackson

Sonatype’s perspective regarding the Hudson Project is pretty simple: we have been and will continue to be committed to advancing Hudson and making better software available to the community of Hudson users.

Very recently, Sonatype completed significant development in the evolution of Hudson’s core architecture. The benefits of these changes include better leveraging of industry standards, increased performance and stability, and tight integration with Maven 3 that provides greater visibility into running builds. We are continuing to add engineers to our Hudson team and are working hard with the Hudson community to move much of the work we’ve done here to Java.net.

Our work on Hudson is consistent with Sonatype’s long history of investment and community support. Our work with Maven at the Apache Software Foundation, with m2eclipse at the Eclipse Foundation, and with Nexus (our open source repository manager) all underscore our commitment to innovation for open source and commercial users alike.

Are we a commercial enterprise? Absolutely. However, our track record of open source innovation and community contribution speaks for itself. At Sonatype, we’ve always focused on the code, and that’s where we’re focused today with Hudson.

Why Nexus Moved to the Affero General Public License


January 4, 2011 By Wayne Jackson

When Sonatype originally chose the GPL license for Nexus, our goal was to provide an innovative OSS repository management technology to the community while also allowing Sonatype to grow a commercial product (Nexus Professional) by adding enterprise features on top of an open source core. At that time, Sonatype decided to use the GPL license because it provided the best balance of community encouragement and community protection.

We chose not to use the AGPLv3 (“Affero” GPL based on the GPL v3) license back then because we did not envision open source Nexus being offered as a service and did not want to raise any unnecessary concerns about a relatively new form of license. With the explosion of cloud computing, however, the likelihood of open source Nexus being delivered as a hosted commercial service is growing steadily. Under the GPL, there is no requirement that enhancements made to open source Nexus by service providers be contributed back to the community. For that reason, we have concluded that the time is right to move to the AGPL where the service provider loophole is closed; affording the community maximum protection as well as significant potential contributions by a new class of user (service providers).

We have been consulting with licensing experts through this decision-making process and are confident that this change will have no effect on the broader Nexus community. The AGPLv3 license will have no incremental effect on the internal use of Nexus, even if you are using Nexus to host artifacts that make up applications that will be part of a service offering. The AGPL only differs from the GPL if you are offering Nexus itself as a service. If you have any questions about this license change I encourage you to contact Brian Fox, our VP of Engineering, via email at brianf@sonatype.com.