🐘 Gradle sponsors Commonhaus Foundation with Develocity to boost build observability and acceleration

Announcement

We’re excited to announce that Gradle, Inc. (the company behind Gradle Build Tool) is providing the Commonhaus Foundation with a dedicated instance of Develocity®, the company’s observability and acceleration platform. This partnership brings comprehensive toolchain observability, build and test acceleration technologies, and rapid troubleshooting features to Commonhaus projects, enabling their communities to build, test, and deploy code faster and with greater confidence.

Develocity integrates seamlessly with popular build systems, including Gradle Build Tool, Apache Maven, sbt, npm, and Python. By offering a shared Develocity instance, Gradle is lowering the barrier for open source maintainers to access enterprise-grade developer productivity tools.

A Proven Tool for Commonhaus Projects

Several projects that are now part of the Commonhaus Foundation, including Hibernate, Quarkus, and Morphia, have already been using Develocity with strong results; for example, Develocity helped the Quarkus team reduce their CI build times by 75%, and the Hibernate team achieved a 70% reduction in build times. For these communities, the partnership represents a continuation of proven practices that improve build reliability and developer productivity.

For projects like Morphia, which recently joined the foundation, Develocity also opens new opportunities to get better visibility into build health, streamline contributions, and reduce time lost on slow builds and flaky tests—using Develocity allowed the Morphia team to cut their Maven build times by 50%. The shared instance will give all Commonhaus projects access to the same proven platform used successfully in the Red Hat ecosystem and beyond.

A Natural Fit for a New Kind of Foundation

Founded in 2024, the Commonhaus Foundation was created to provide an alternative governance model for open source projects. Unlike traditional foundations that may impose top-down processes, Commonhaus emphasizes lightweight governance, fiscal sponsorship, and project autonomy. The goal is to give maintainers a “safe home” where their projects can flourish long-term without sacrificing independence.

Commonhaus helps projects by:

  • Offering succession planning to ensure community continuity.
  • Providing fiscal and legal support, such as handling donations and sponsorships.
  • Maintaining minimal governance, so projects can operate the way they always have.
  • Ensuring stability and transparency so contributors and users can trust in the project’s future.

This approach resonates with developer communities that want the benefits of foundation support without heavy-handed oversight.

Quotes from Leaders

“Commonhaus Foundation represents a visionary model for sustainably self-governed OSS projects,” said Hans Dockter, co-founder and CEO of Gradle, Inc. “Our Develocity sponsorship supports their mission of long-term stability and innovation while helping maintainers avoid slow builds and flaky tests. Develocity gives them the observability and acceleration they need to focus on features and move faster with confidence.”

“We’re excited and thankful to have Gradle’s support,” said Erin Schnabel, Chair of the Commonhaus Foundation. “Develocity helps projects stay nimble, transparent, and resilient over time. This partnership means maintainers can spend less energy firefighting infrastructure issues and more time driving innovation in their communities.”

About Develocity

Develocity helps engineering teams and OSS maintainers with:

  • Actionable Toolchain Observability: Surface insights and optimize performance for continuous delivery excellence with Develocity 360
  • Build & Test Acceleration: Accelerate local and CI build and test cycles without compromising speed using Build Cache, Predictive Test Selection, and Test Distribution
  • Seamless Developer Troubleshooting: Develocity now includes an MCP server that assists and accelerates your build and test failure troubleshooting via Agentic AI, leveraging features like Flaky Test Detection, Failure Analytics, and Performance Insights

Today, Develocity is used by leading enterprises like Netflix, LinkedIn, ASML, Airbnb, Microsoft, Nasdaq, and SA, and provides free instances to over 20 foundation-led OSS projects to streamline developer productivity.

Take a look at the Commonhaus Develocity instance and try Develocity Build Scan® for free to get a deeper look into your own builds and tests.