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Who Controls Vert.x: Red Hat, VMware, Neither?
snydeq writes "Simon Phipps sheds light on a fight for control over Vert.x, an open source project for scalable Web development that 'seems immunized to corporate control.' 'Vert.x is an asynchronous, event-driven open source framework running on the JVM. It supports the most popular Web programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, Groovy, Ruby, and Python. It's getting lots of attention, though not necessarily for the right reasons. A developer by the name of Tim Fox, who worked at VMware until recently, led the Vert.x project — before VMware's lawyers forced him to hand over the Vert.x domain, blog, and Google Group. Ironically, the publicity around this action has helped introduce a great technology with an important future to the world. The dustup also illustrates how corporate politics works in the age of open source: As corporate giants grasp for control, community foresight ensures the open development of innovative technology carries on.'"
Moral: if you are working on a FOSS project, make sure you have disclaimers in writing from the company you work for. Double if you're the project lead.
Sorry.
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His employer can't have the ownership of the project because he never had any ownership over it. The project is licensed under Apache. They could only forcibly take the governance, but then again the project can be forked at will, and VMWare will end with just a name if they force the issue. There is nothing VMWare can do about it other than concede or hostilize the community and force a Branch. Either way VMWare loses.
It also doesn't support COBOL.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
There is precedence for this, it happened before with the Sun OpenDS and the Sun/Oracle Hudson Open Source projects. When the contest of ownership comes down to project developers and corporate lawyers the lawyers usually win the legal battle but the developers win the community battle due to forking.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
That would probably be because the PHP-Java bridge is a kludge and horribly inefficient. Having had occasion to use the bridge for a non-trivial project, I am actually ok with this Java-based server not supporting it.
That said, if you really want the headache, I am sure you can figure out a way to use the PHP-Java bridge to tie to your current PHP apps and use them as Java in the Vert.x server. I do have to say, though, I do pity anyone who has to do this.
Death looks every man in the face. All any man can do is look back and smile. - Marcus Aurelius
From a quick look, it seems to be some FastCGI-like API with bindings for various programming languages.
You couldn't deduce that at all from the summary.
Unfortunately in the US at least, that's on a state by state basis, with the minority actually letting you separate work projects from out of work projects.
List of states and relevant laws: http://answers.onstartups.com/a/20126
My UID is prime... is yours?
It would be nice if anyone RTFA before posting. The project is explicitly registered as a public domain project under Apache license. The only thing that is registered in the name of VMWare is the trademark, the name Vert.x, and that is all this, and the domains associated to it are everything they were able to claim, which you would know had you read the article.
Actually they already decided to go and give the administrative control of the groups back to Tim Fox, but even after VMWare was forced to withdraw after stupidly trying to force their hand, it is not sure that the community will let them get away with it. The talk about forking is not over yet.
Whether WMWare owns copyright or not is irrelevant. VMWare was aware of, and consented to, the licensing terms the code was publicly released under. They can stop contributing new code, but they cannot remove the code already released. Their ownership interest going forward is 100% irrelevant.
Or better yet, don't use any corporate resources in developing this. Do it on your own time, on your own computer which stays w/ ya once you quit the job, and the company has no claims whatsoever over what you did.
Or carry on all your work in a highly public way (as in this case). If you do open source work on company time, as many do with the full knowledge of their manager and/or employer, then a thing called estoppel kicks in. That means, if you are doing public work and your employer knows about it but does not tell you to stop, or on the contrary, expresses approval, it means you have tacit agreement to carry on in the way that both you and your employer are presenting themselves to the world. Or in other words, if it walks like an open source project and quacks like an open source project, it's an open source project, and in absence of any specific agreement to the contrary, that cannot be undone at the whim of an employer.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Why don't you enlighten us with your literacy and tell us why the JVM isn't one of the most influential and important software inventions in the past 20 years. I'd personally love to hear your reasoning (read: i think you're full of shit).
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)