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.'"

Comments

Assumption is the mother of all fuckups

[Shimbo]

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.

Re:Assumption is the mother of all fuckups

[fredprado]

Either way, if VMWare press the issue they will simply fork and go away, and VMWare will end as the leader of a deceased project.

Re:Assumption is the mother of all fuckups

[Shimbo]

Either way, if VMWare press the issue they will simply fork and go away, and VMWare will end as the leader of a deceased project.

It depends how hardball VMware want to play it. If they assert ownership of the code, and decline to release it under an open source licence then they can pretty much kill the fork as well. "Oh sorry, the code you thought was Apache licenced, sorry he had no right to do that - it's ours."

Re:Assumption is the mother of all fuckups

[rtfa-troll]

If they assert ownership of the code, and decline to release it under an open source licence then they can pretty much kill the fork as well.

a) Fortunately not because VMWare and Red Hat have already made a posting otherwise.

b) Fortunately not because this is a public project and has been explicitly and openly discussed by a number of people from VMWare over a long time. In general, companies are liable for the things their employees do as part of their work. Especially if they knew about it or should have known about it. The only comeback they have is disciplinary action against the employee. Judges sometimes come down really hard on companies which try to wriggle out of this kind of thing.

c) Just think about it. If what you said was true, wouldn't Barings bank just have said "no; sorry, rogue trader; give us back our stolen dollars". Don't think the tech industry will manage tricks the financial industry has never thought of.

Re:Unless it's it writing elsewhere....

[fredprado]

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.

Nothing new under the Sun

[nickmalthus]

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.

Re:Nothing new under the Sun

[Tough Love]

So does that mean that VMWare will soon be bought by Oracle?

Re:Does not support PHP

[Evardsson]

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.

Re:Unless it's it writing elsewhere....

[Tough Love]

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.