Groovy should have a clear governance structure
kohsuke.org
kohsuke.org
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 [2] http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/GPars-Web-site-revolution... [3] http://www.groovy-lang.org/