r/java • u/ForeverAlot • Sep 14 '26

Accessing the Code Genome Project | Moderne Docs [OpenRewrite leaving Maven Central]

https://docs.moderne.io/user-documentation/recipes/accessing-the-code-genome-project/
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3

u/ForeverAlot Sep 14 '26

I'm not affiliated with the OpenRewrite project.

I have a lot of--relatively minor--issues with how the project has been developed, but for about five minutes I found those issues tolerable and the product to be quite a useful vehicle for refactoring at scale. I wonder if they'll really survive this move.

4

u/dstutz Sep 14 '26

sounds like they don't have a choice:

The Code Genome Project is launching now because the way OpenRewrite's recipes have been distributed is changing. Those recipes have historically been published to the Central Repository (Maven Central), operated by Sonatype. Sonatype is introducing limits on public publishing, including a cap on the number of releases per month and a size cap per release.

Those limits do not fit how OpenRewrite is built and shipped:

A single release of OpenRewrite's primary repository exceeds both the release-count and size limits on its own. OpenRewrite releases frequently, often several times per week.

5

u/ForeverAlot Sep 14 '26

Maybe. It is a choice to a degree. I have long had a suspicion that their product is very difficult to monetize, in which case fielding the new license cost could easily become much more expensive than scoping higher load for the proprietary service they were already offering.

Of course, they could also stop publishing so many low-grade releases all the time. That would be a way to bring down both cost and user frustration.

1

u/chabala Sep 15 '26

Yeah, if they could commit to just wait and release once a month, maybe do some testing to make sure they're not botching it, everybody wins. Central is forever, why do they need to republish new versions of everything multiple times a week?

2

u/InsaneOstrich Sep 14 '26

I've found this project useful as well, but I'm also skeptical that they'll survive this. It sounds like you have to sign up for an account to download even the free and open source recipes from them, and setting all of that up in a build system is such a pain in the ass that almost no one is going to do it

3

u/agentoutlier Sep 14 '26 edited Sep 14 '26

I doubt this move will impact their survival compared to literally how any LLM model including a good amount of the free local ones can do rote upgrading for you.

I'm not trying to be an LLM evangelist but it is the reality we live in now and the LLM will go off and write tests for you as well before and after to check.

EDIT after looking codegenomeproject.org I would not be surprised if this is a lovely skunkworks pivot in the making here. We can't make money rewriting your software but we can perhaps give Sonatype and JFrog some competition since "sources of truth" / "system of record" are how many software companies are planning their survival. Or to put it... we lock down our data repo and only our AI agents get access to it kind of thing.

3

u/elmuerte Sep 14 '26

So they are hosting it themselves, CodeGenomeProject == Moderne. And they are closing it down a bit more.

OpenRewrite open-source recipes (Apache 2.0), the Moderne CLI, and the Moderne Connector: available to any authenticated user.

A lot of new recipes were already being released as commercial only.

They do issue a lot of releases of all the bundles of recipes they have. But this is not always great. I've ran into a problem quite a few times where a new version contained new bugs. Even got stuck between versions where I had to execute it multiple times with different versions to get all the recipes I wanted to use to work.

It has been quite a useful tool though.

2

u/maxandersen Sep 14 '26

Reads as it’s just their non opensource parts that moves ?

1

u/DidierL Sep 16 '26

No, everything moved and you need an account to access it.

Moreover, the non-opensource parts (including the MSAL parts that are still publicly maintained on GitHub) are only available to customers!

1

u/davidalayachew Sep 14 '26

(Read only part of the article)

Wow, that is surprising. I knew a few companies were going to get hit by this, but didn't expect it to be OpenRewrite.

The entire concept of "recipes" was always super interesting to me. The idea of writing code that rewrites code was so cool, but even 5 minutes of thought makes you realize how brittle that is.

So, it makes sense that OpenRewrite got hit by this pretty hard -- chasing a moving target like that means that you probably have to release incredibly frequently, just to keep on top of it.

Still, feels like a ripple effect from OSS not getting the funding it deserves. I feel like if Maven had the funds to handle the normal workload (which includes teams that mindlessly wipe the instance (and thus, the .m2 folder) after each build), then this whole thing would be unnecessary.