Codehaus

» see codehaus.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Codehaus was a string in a stack trace before it was a website to me. org.codehaus.plexus and org.codehaus.mojo turned up in the dependency tree of anything built with Maven, and if you touched Java in the late 2000s those packages were in your build whether you had chosen them or not. I never had an account there. I used what came out of it constantly.

Bob McWhirter registered the domain on 26 February 2003. He had already been shipping open-source Java for years, Jaxen and the early Drools among it, and the idea behind the Haus was a forge with taste: not the sprawling anything-goes directory that SourceForge had become, but a curated set of projects with real infrastructure behind them. Hosting and mailing lists, issue tracking, a wiki, a build server. Projects applied and were let in.

The flagship arrived almost immediately. Groovy was publicly born at a Codehaus gathering in October 2003, eight months after the domain existed. Jetty moved in. So did XStream and Jackson, Mule and JMock and XDoclet after them, along with the Mojo collection that supplied a large chunk of the Maven plugin ecosystem. For most of a decade, a working Java build pulled from codehaus.org whether the developer noticed the hostname or not.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it was paid for ~

Banner ads. That was the model, and for a long time it worked, because a forge serving millions of build requests to professional developers is an attractive thing to put an ad on. Around 2013 the income derived from ad revenue stopped meeting the hosting expenses, which is the operators' own phrasing. Display advertising was collapsing everywhere at once and a volunteer-run forge had no second revenue line to fall back on.

The competition did not help either. By then GitHub and Bitbucket were giving away better versions of everything Codehaus provided, funded by venture money rather than by banners. Codehaus had no subscription to sell and no investor to burn, so the gap between the banner income and the Contegix invoice just stayed open.

~ 11:53pm ~

SonarSource stepped in and sponsored the Haus for one final stretch of three months, carrying it to 31 May 2015 so that projects had a window to pack up. Late that night, at 11:53pm, the termination ticket was raised with Contegix, the hosting provider, to shut everything down. The time is recorded in Codehaus's own history file, which survives on GitHub, filed by whoever sent the ticket.

~ the diaspora ~

Groovy had already left. Pivotal stopped sponsoring it in April 2015 and the project moved to the Apache Software Foundation incubator, where it became Apache Groovy and is still maintained. Jetty had gone to Eclipse years earlier. Most of the rest scattered to GitHub, some of it under the original maintainers and some of it not at all.

What did not survive is the connective tissue: twelve years of issue history, wiki pages, mailing list threads and build logs that explained why the code looks the way it does. 2015 took Google Code in the same window, and between the two of them a decade of open-source Java archaeology stopped being reachable by URL.

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