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: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.