Mark Little, Vice President of Engineering at Red Hat/JBoss, has made a statement regarding the recent uncertainty in the community over the future of the asynchronous, event-driven Java and JVM framework vert.x. The statement was jointly made by Little and Alexis Richardson, a senior director at VMware. Little conceded that what Tim Fox, vert.x project leader, had disclosed regarding VMware's demands to have ownership of the project's infrastructure handed over to it, had "obviously raised concerns on this group and elsewhere".

Little says that both Red Hat and VMware are "in active discussion" over how to support the project and options include the possibility of moving it to an open source software foundation. Fox's continued status as project lead is described as "an essential component to the success of the project" and both companies "see no reason for this to change". Little then called for patience from the community and asked for continued positive contributions to the discussion.

In the wake of Little's statement, Apache Software Foundation President Jim Jagielski invited Fox and the vert.x community to, if they were interested, discuss moving vert.x under the foundation's structures. Fox himself, says that forking the project has not yet been ruled out. Fellow vert.x developer Stuart (Pid) Williams, said he believed that an "outcome that involves the minimum disruption, a single community and the support of both companies is preferable and achievable".

Update - Tim Fox has now opened a discussion specifically about what the future of vert.x should be. He offers four options and expresses his preference for a "Netty-style solution" where IP rights are held by the project. He does not think foundations are a good option as they require trust between contributors and that "there has been an almost complete breakdown of trust and communication between myself and VMW due the recent actions and subsequent behind the scenes political actions by certain parties".

See also:

(djwm)