An important announcement to the Vert.x community

I don't think something like that can happen with Redis. I don't want to focus on the technical reasons why this is impossible, but even just from the point of view of "handling" this stuff in the best way from both sides:

1) I'll not leave VMware for another company. I received several offers from other companies, and I never ever investigated what the salary or stocks or conditions could be. It is as simple as that: VMware provided huge value to the Redis community for several years and is extremely supportive. There is no reason for me to go to another company.

2) But VMware may fire me. If this will happen it can only happen because there is a lost of interest about Redis for some reason. In this case it will be natural for me to continue in some other way the development, and if VMware will be no longer interested in Redis, it is unlikely it will be against me continuing the development in alternative ways.

Btw about the current issue with Vert.x, what I see is that a developer signed some contract where the IP is transfered to VMware, and later joined what can be considered a competitor. My feeling is that the current evolution was a bit expected or at least not so unlikely.

Yes, but as I recall Salvatore created redis before joining VMWare. I have to believe that unless he signed some document explicitly granting them ownership he would retain rights over the redis name, etc. In other words, very different.

It is open source, they want the rights to the name that the project was run under transfered to the company now that the employee that was running the project (effectively on their behalf if his salaried time was given over to the product) has left. It doesn't seem really that it is too unrealistic an expectation and should have been thought out in advance really.

vert.x doesn't have near the community Hudson/Jenkins does. It likely requires a strong steward with corporate backing. If RedHat would support a fork, that's be awesome. Maybe under the JBoss name. Vertx is Apache licensed.

Understandable but poorly handled.

Perhaps VMWare could find an internal product owner for vert.x. From there they could meet with Tim Fox and discuss the roles he will be allowed to occupy within the community while, understandably, protecting their interests. I'd imagine this would be some level of admin level role while funneling most important items through the new product owner.

If VMWare had gone this route and then made an announcement while introducing this new product owner/internal advocate with Tim Fox at their side I think it would have gone a long way to smooth the transition.

As it stands my first reaction is...'Uh oh, better fork it'.

Python has been around since the early 90s, the website is run by the python foundation - not sure how this could ever work.

Not sure why you were downvoted, you bring up a good point that should be explained.

Vert.x is "polyglot" (i.e. write in various JVM languages) and multi-threaded, even clustered, easily. For people who are building services and care about these things, it's a boon. Our team has been planning to use Vert.x for future services, but this development certainly raises concerns. I understand it can be forked, but I would rather see the two companies working together rather than battling it out.

I think vert.x looks pretty cool and was just about to try it out before this. I'm doing some work that requires a neat Java based NIO web server. I've done a lot of work on top of Netty directly but vert.x looks like a nice higher level abstraction (e.g. routing etc.).

nodejs is great but having the JVM and it's vast set of libraries is pretty compelling.

Maybe nodejs won the love of a lot of kids that know how to program in Javascript. Maybe it didn't win the love of seasoned C++, Java, and Erlang programmers. Sometimes blog exposure and cool sites and presentations don't necessarily equal serious real world usage.

IANAL, but my understanding is that if the project is initiated and developed by an employee using company resources on "company time", then ownership of the work is automatically granted to the company, as a "work for hire". With the exception of patent rights, that is, which are nonetheless assigned to the company as a matter of course in standard employee contracts. So no special contract is needed if the creator of a project is an employee.

There is a very subtle but important point here. He worked for VMware so he had an employment agreement with VMware. That may have conveyed rights to things he worked on to the company, so even working on an open source project, his work is 'owned' by the folks who pay him.

I am not a lawyer, personal circumstances led me to do a lot of research on this topic and consult with both a lawyer who was versed in employment law and one who specialized in Intellectual Property law to see what was what. And in California your employer can claim ownership of anything you create or "enhance" which is either done on company time, or with company resources, or (and this is the tricky bit) associated with the business or goals of the company.

From the posting it sounds like this is what VMware is alleging which is that they 'own' this work he did and have asked him to transfer it back to the company. I know that sounds weird to someone who might think they were working on a free software project but it is the way the law is structured.