Who Controls Vert.x: Red Hat, VMware, Neither? 118
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.'"
Java = great (Score:1, Interesting)
Oracle = bad
Re:Unless it's it writing elsewhere.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.