

Groovy should have a clear governance structure - christop
http://kohsuke.org/2015/01/20/groovy-project-should-have-a-clear-governance-structure/

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vorg
> Is the name “Groovy” trademarked? If so, who owns it? How about the domain
> name? How is the decision making done? Who becomes committers?

Groovy 1.0 had a copyright message saying Groovy was a registered trademark of
Codehaus. However, I couldn't find it in the online U.S. trademark query
service at the time, and in Groovy 1.5 the notice had been removed. When
Groovy's creator James Strachan left the project, he still refered to Groovy
at Codehaus as the "current reference implementation" in his last ever mailing
list posting.

Codehaus currently lists 5 people as "despots" [1] viz Jochen Theodorou,
Guillaume Laforge, Paul King, Ben Walding, and Cedric Champeau. One of them,
Laforge, has always claimed to be the "Project Manager" but recently started
pitching himself as the "creator". Another, Theodorou, claims to be the "Tech
Lead", although Laforge stopped using that title for Theodorou after Champeau
was employed by SpringSource/Pivotal 3 yrs ago. Another despot, Walding, is
the Codehaus administrator who has nothing to do with Groovy, and Groovy is
the only project that has him listed as a despot.

Groovy isn't only losing its Pivotal funding but also its Codehaus repository
soon: "Codehaus hasn't made an announcement yet, but contacted some of us
privately so far. But they mentioned a mid-February deadline, after which
_all_ projects will have to have been migrated elsewhere. Everything hosted at
Codehaus will disappear. JIRA, website, mailing-lists, Git/SVN, Bamboo..." [2]
Some of the developers are promoting a new internet address [3] but I don't
know who controls it.

I'd agree that the ownership problems related to the brand, codebase, support,
channels, and what not, makes the whole mess is a legal nightmare. Pivotal
obviously decided simply terminating funding was more profitable than trying
to split off a separate business and sell it all to someone else.

[1]
[https://xircles.codehaus.org/projects/groovy/members](https://xircles.codehaus.org/projects/groovy/members)
[2] [http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/GPars-Web-site-
revolution...](http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/GPars-Web-site-revolution-
help-sought-tt5722181.html#a5722194) [3] [http://www.groovy-
lang.org/](http://www.groovy-lang.org/)

