Sun's Kenai to Close in 60 Days and Work Halted on Darkstar but Hudson Survives

Update February 7, 2010, 19:49 GMT: Since this post was first written Oracle have announced that they plan to re-use the kenai.com technology for java.net.

Whilst many of Sun's software projects have survived the Oracle acquisition, details are continuing to emerge of projects that are being closed down. We previously covered that Sun's cloud project is not part of Oracle's plans, and it has also now been announced that the project Kenai website – home to nearly 40,000 registered users – is being closed as a public offering.

Launched in September 2008 and built using JRuby, GlassFish vs 2 and MySQL, Kenai's services included version controlled source code repositories (Mercurial, Subversion, Git), team wikis, a download area to host documents, an integrated team member IM chat, issue tracking (JIRA, Bugzilla), forums, mailing lists, and web hooks for selected events. Its main distinguishing feature from sites like Google Code or SourceForge was that it included social networking features for members. In addition with the release of the NetBeans IDE version 6.7, it became possible to maintain Kenai projects directly from inside an IDE.

According to Oracle's Chief Architect and Vice President of Tools and Middleware, Ted Farrell, Kenai "wasn't quite working" and Oracle therefore wanted to bring it in house where it would use it, "flush it out", and add some features. Farrell said Oracle may re-release Kenai for public use if it finds some value in the project.

In an email sent to project administrators The Project Kenai Team state

The complete shutdown of the site and the removal of the domain will be completed in the next 60 days (April 2nd 2010). This should provide ample time for all projects to be moved to a new home of the project owner's choice.

JRuby project lead and former Sun employee Charles Nutter told InfoQ

As a user and supporter of Project Kenai, I was definitely sad (and a little angry) to hear that the public-facing site will be shut down. I'm glad to hear the Kenai infrastructure will live on for Oracle's internal use, and that it might surface publicly again, but it's disappointing that so many projects and users will be forced to move. I'm still hopeful that Oracle will prove to be good for the JVM community and all the many open-source projects that JVM-based developers depend on. Sun's spirit of openness must not be allowed to die.

Ferrall has subsequently clarified Oracle's plans for Kenai, stating that whilst the kenai.com site is being closed Oracle will be migrating Java.net to use Kenai technology and will try to make the migration as smooth as possible for kenai.com users.

Our plan is to shut down kenai.com and focus our efforts on java.net as the hosted development community. We are in the process of migrating java.net to the kenai technology. 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.

Oracle has also stopped work on project Darkstar, an open source MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming) middleware solution written in Java by a research team at Sun Microsystems. A forum post announced

Sun Labs engineering effort is no longer being applied to Darkstar development.

With a number of Sun's open source efforts under threat there was some concern that work on Sun's Continuous Integration server Hudson might also have been stopped, but it looks set to survive. Hudson will be added to JDeveloper to provide enhanced application lifecycle management capabilities.