It appears van Zyl is with Sonatype, a company working with Oracle to continue Hudson under its original name:

http://www.sonatype.com/people/2011/02/hudsons-bright-future...

Fantastic excerpt from it

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The Hudson lead, Winston Prakash from Oracle, is highly skilled, very thoughtful, and he cares about the community. He is also the first person to create detailed, comprehensive architectural documentation.

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So now the main accomplishment of the current project lead is writing detailed documentation. Those that can - code, those that can't - write very detailed documentation. Yeah, I think I'll stick with Jenkins...

>> So now the main accomplishment of the current project lead is writing detailed documentation. Those that can - code, those that can't - write very detailed documentation.

So we're now running people down for decent documentation? Seriously?

No, we are looking for a pretext to run down people who work for Oracle.

Because Oracle is behaving like bully we don't need much of a pretext.

Then go with that rather than picking on people for basic good practice.

Let's just say that if I see a resume on my desk and the _main_ accomplishment of the candidate is writing detailed documentation, that person probably won't get the job as a lead developer.

On the other hand good documentation is essential if you want many users. I think that O'Reilly, Coriolis, New Riders, and the other publishers have had more to do with the wider use of open source in the last 15 years than ESR and the FSF itself.

Architectural documentation and user documentation are two completely different things. User documentation is what O'Reilly does. Architectural documentation is what Oracle is claiming to have done.

See this recent Sonatype blog post for more background: http://www.sonatype.com/people/2011/02/hudsons-bright-future...

IMO, it sounds like Sonatype (which was already bundling a version of Hudson in their premium product) sees this recent fork as an opportunity to ramp up their contribution to the "offical" Hudson project and take some control.