Oracle Moving Project Kenai to java.net

  • By John K. Waters
  • 02/17/10

Oracle has clarified its plans for Project Kenai. Rather than simply changing the Sun Microsystems-hosted developer collaboration platform for open source projects to in-house-only usage, Oracle is moving the Kenai code base to the publicly available java.net community portal.

Oracle had previously announced that developers with public projects on the Kenai Web site would have to move them to another host by April 2, 2010. But the company shifted gears last Friday. In a blog post on the Project Kenai Web site, Ted Farrell, Oracle's chief architect and senior vice president of the tools and middleware group, apologized to users of the site: "... I think we did a poor job at communicating our plans for Kenai.com to you," Farrell wrote. "I would like to remedy that now."

According to Farrell, Oracle plans to shut down kenai.com and support java.net as the company's hosted development community--including developers with projects on kenai.com. But those developers shouldn't make any moves just yet, Farrell said.

"We are in the process of migrating java.net to the kenai technology," he wrote. "This means that any project currently hosted on kenai.com will be able to continue as you are on java.net. We are still working out the technical details, but the goal is to make this migration as seamless as possible for the current kenai.com projects. So in the meantime I suggest that you stay put on kenai.com and let us work through the details and get back to you later this month."

Launched in September 2008, Project Kenai provides a free hosting service for developers of open source projects. The site provided wikis, forums, IM chat and other collaboration tools. It allows developers to create up to five source-code repositories for each project, and to utilize any combination of Subversion, Mercurial and Git for version control, as well as access to a JIRA or Bugzilla issue tracker.

About the Author

John K. Waters is a freelance journalist and author based in Mountain View, CA.

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