Agreed, with one exception -- to expose the other side to the public. I think Oracle is showing its face (again) and I think it is in the community's interest to _let_ it keep showing its face.
In all, there's little good that would come out of it and a ton of risk for Kawaguchi.
> what would have happened to Oracle?
Well eventually the same thing that happened to SCO ;-)
They are losing credibility in the PR domain even more. This is not directed towards the general public or even Oracle's corporate customers, but towards the hackers, sysadmins, and other tech workers. The opinions of those people matter however, and eventually they will be consulted by those that make purchasing decisions. A general mistrust and dislike of Oracle will take its toll.
Oracle has some very good products. SCO had a Unix nobody wanted anymore (at least, nobody with two or more neurons).
True. I wanted it.
I find this very unlikely.
UPDATE: According to tweets in another comment, I'm wrong and van Zyl did cause this. I'm still inclined to attribute this to incompetence rather than malice though.
But I do not think it's as simple as it seems and blaming everything on Oracle's "native evilness" is a bit naive. Quite the contrary, I'm starting to get the feeling that the 'community' might have been played a bit and all the Oracle bashing used as a trampoline for the fork.
Take this message for example: why did Kohsuke feel the need to post this publicly? He left Sun/Oracle, just had closed negotiations between Oracle and his new employer Cloudbees regarding Hudson (done while working at Sun) and recently got "the community" to vote on a fork. He certainly has enough detail contacts to resolve this privately if needed, so why would he choose to post this publicly?
But yeah, the reply in itself couldn't have been more insinuating.
Do I read this as, "We deliberately locked you out and removed your attribution, and we hint we can fix things, and we want you to do certain things for us, but no we aren't actually saying we'll fix anything and no we didn't tell you about it in advance?"
Really, I would just walk away from anyone trying to deal with me on this basis. Come out and say what you did and what you're going to do. If you need my help with something, ask, and don't try to hint things are tied together when they aren't.