Frequently Asked Questions
ThoughtWorks Studios, Cruise, and CruiseControl
What is Cruise?
Cruise is a new product, most of which ThoughtWorks Studios have developed from scratch in less than eight months. It offers massive scalability, fault-tolerance and ease of use. We focused our development efforts on innovative features such as easy to setup grids and the ability to create deployment pipelines that allow you to automate your software life-cycle from development all the way through to production. No other product offers these features together in one system. Although we still use the open source CruiseControl code to do the actual building on Cruise Agents, Cruise Server is written from the ground up to support this powerful feature set. We hope you'll agree that it's been worth it.
Why is Cruise being released as a commercial product rather than an open source one?
The ThoughtWorks Cruise team began work in March of 2007, and spent eight months developing a new dashboard which we contributed to the open source project. However we had a vision for a next-generation product which had features well beyond what the open source project offered. The only way for us to make the investment to develop the product we wanted to build in the time we wanted to build it was to follow a commercial development model.
We will be offering a one-agent free edition of Cruise which gives you all the features of the commercial edition. We will also be offering free licenses to open source projects and academic institutions. Our mission is to make build and deployment automation a basic practice for all software developers in the same way that using source control is standard today. Our licensing and pricing model are designed to reflect this mission.
What's the relationship between Cruise and the open source CruiseControl project?
The CruiseControl open source project will continue as usual. The CruiseControl committers, none of whom are on the commercial Cruise team, will continue to pursue their vision for open source CruiseControl. ThoughtWorks continues to support open source projects.