Pivotal today announced that it will fund the next two major releases of the Groovy and Grails through March 31st, 2015, after which it will no longer directly fund development on these open source projects. Since the acquisition of G2One by SpringSource in 2008, SpringSource, VMware, and subsequently Pivotal have collectively sponsored the Groovy and Grails projects.
Groovy is an agile and dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine that builds upon the strengths of Java but has additional power features inspired by languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk. Groovy makes modern programming features available to Java developers with almost-zero learning curve. Grails is an open source, full stack, web application framework for the JVM. It takes advantage of the Groovy programming language and convention over configuration to provide a productive and stream-lined development experience.
The decision to conclude its sponsorship of Groovy and Grails is part of Pivotal’s larger strategy to concentrate resources on accelerating both commercial and open source projects that support its growing traction in Platform-as-a-Service, Data, and Agile development. Pivotal has determined that the time is right to let further development of Groovy and Grails be led by other interested parties in the open source community who can best serve the goals of those projects.
Both Groovy and Grails have a small group of dedicated developers and contributors, and an active core on Github. In the spirit of good stewardship and a commitment to open source, the March 31st deadline provides both projects time to put out their next major releases, and evolve or secure new sponsorship. Pivotal will honor the terms of any existing Groovy and Grails commercial support contracts that extend beyond March 31st.
Pivotal is exploring several options for the Groovy and Grails projects and teams, trusting that the community will continue to develop strong solutions after its dedicated developer sponsorship expires. Pivotal will maintain both support and staffing of the small teams dedicated to these projects through that period.
After March 31st, Pivotal will continue to fund the Grails website (http://grails.org), an application that is used by thousands of developers globally, to release and publish plug-ins via the Pivotal Web Services hosted plug-in portal. Groovy also has a strong and active user base outside of Pivotal, where a number of Java developers have been acquainted with Groovy through the Gradle build automation framework.
Interested Groovy and Grails sponsors or parties should contact Pivotal at gg-sponsorship@pivotal.io.
Existing support contracts for active G&G customers will be honored to the end of the current contract term. Contact Pivotal customer support for details at customer-service@pivotal.io.
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