I just came back from Tokyo to learn that the Groovy project is looking for a new home. Related posts from the project leaders here, here, and here. Hacker News commentary is here.
This news hit close to home for me for several reasons. For one, I like Groovy a lot myself, to the point that I have developed several projects around it (like this and this.) Two, the Jenkins project uses Groovy a lot in various places. I think Groovy has a number of things going for them, such as great IDE support (and the optional static typing boosts this), greater compatibility with Java, and an existing ecosystem. So my best wishes to them.
One of the things I realizing while reading the news is that I actually don’t know the governance structure of the project. Is the name “Groovy” trademarked? If so, who owns it? How about the domain name? How is the decision making done? Who becomes committers?
Questions like this are important at times like this, because we don’t know how much is owned by Pivotal, and that determines how much is up in the air.
For example, had Groovy been an Apache project, then we’d know the answers to all of the questions above, and this news really just boils down to who would be willing to hire the team and let them work on the project. Maybe they won’t find a single company that is willing to hire everyone and put them all full time on open-source Groovy — I bet they talked to prospects in private before going public, so at this point I assume the chance of this happening is pretty low. But I have no doubt they will each find a gainful employment that does involve some open-source Groovy work.
In contrast, if Groovy is a company-sponsored open-source project like Spring was, in that the company owns all the key assets and dictates the development process, then we have a lot bigger problem at hand, because there’s greater uncertainty. The project would have a bigger risk of fragmentation (for example if the team gets hired by different competing companies.) Perhaps license would change.
This is why I think the ownership of the project should be thought separately from the ownership of the developers (i.e. who pays the salary of the key contributers of the project.) When the latter changes, having the former sorted out considerably reduces the impact. And this comes from my own personal experience dealing with Hudson/Jenkins. This is one of the reasons why the Jenkins project has a governance structure laid out.
So I’d like to encourage the Groovy project to sit down and clarify the governance. This should be a part of their “find a new home” plan. Maybe they could even just join Apache Software Foundation since the license is compatible, maybe they could come over to SPI, where Jenkins is.
At this point, I’d be very happy with a less active Groovy project without a corporate sponsorship. But I wouldn’t like to see a governance-less Groovy project. I think they can avoid that.
Update: I’ve written a follow-up post on this topic
