About being a paid OSS Developer for Groovy

Groovy is my Child in code you could say. For over 10 years I helped the project. I was one of the first guys to be paid to get bugs fixed and work done in Groovy and did so for about 9 years.

In the beginning it was a nice experience. I mean you do your job, you help the community and work on your hobby at the same time! Ideal, or not? Well, not ideal. It largely depends on if this continues as being perceived as hobby project and really don't care about the success or if you do care. Well, getting into a company with services around Groovy and Grails, namely G2One and having to fight off trolls all the time, made me start caring... and soon frustrated. Sure, the workload was high, but I could cope with that. What frustrated me was more, that we couldn't do as much progress on Groovy as we could have if we had more man-power. And G2One management adding feature after feature without testing or documentation, or at least considering the community did not help here at all. But at least there was the perspective of having more people on the project in the future. G2One then being bought by SpringSource stirred up that hope even more. The actual handling of the Groovy and Grails team in SpringSource on the other hand was different. A few liked us, a few hated us, most ignored us. Well, that would have been fine, but there was also no real plan of continuation. Instead things continued as before - with less new features, but more difficult to maintain code... And hope died again. Actually not fully, there was not enough time for that, since we then got bought by VMware. If we had been somewhere deep down in the management chain before, now we have been even deeper down. And what is worse, now not only would we have to get SpingSource convinced, but also VMware.

That's where I started not hoping anymore.. till we got wind of an open position that we had a chance of getting someone on. We had to act fast, pressure management as best as we could and finally got 2013 Cedric on board. The Groovy team of paid developers got actually bigger for once. You have no idea how happy I was about that. Not only did we get another guy working on core, also a really capable one! It still took years to make Cedric feeling at home in most of the codebase. But I also noticed increased usage of Groovy, bugs getting more difficult to fix and that 2 developers doing coding work fulltime, even with as great contributors as we have is not enough.

Still I stayed a bit more happy, I was thinking that maybe in a few years we can get another person working on these things... especially with us being now Pivotal and them wanting to be so open-source-oriented and with Spring-Boot using Groovy too. Well, turns out Pivotal cares only about OSS if they can use it. From the POV of a business man I can understand this very well. But that involves seeing people only as cost factors and not as human beings. Makes me really wonder about their other projects and what happens if their attention shifts. And I so much now remember my discussion with a nice guy on the W-JAX in Munich, Germany in November 2014. He said there is one very interesting thing about American companies, if something doesn't contribute to their business anymore, they cut it. That may or may not apply to "American companies", it seems to apply to Pivotal. Ok, Pivotal tried to help and be nice with the transition, but I think that is more a lesson learned by the Vert.X disaster at VMware-times - and some more sane people trying not to make the company looking too bad. As an OSS-member Pivotal already failed for me. And if Pivotal management does not change their thinking, then they will stay a failure. I expect several more OSS related problems with Pivotal in the future.

Anyway.. the result is that all of the paid Groovy guys... Cedric (developer), Guillaume (manager and evangelist) and me (developer) had to leave Pivotal. This means, even if I would be getting someone paying me to spend 80-100% on Groovy, I still would be the only one doing more or less fulltime. Not sure how much Gradle will let Cedric work on Groovy, but I expect not much more than 20% - on good days. This also means I would have to see Groovy as hobby project again. A project like Groovy really needs at least the equivalent of 3 full time developers to even cope with the bugs and not having any joy to work on some new ideas.

At this point I am still here being serious about Groovy, but by far not having the resources. I am shifting gears and will make Groovy my hobby again. I probably should never have changed the POV and getting serious about Groovy. But would I then have joined G2One? Most likely not. I would have had to leave the project long before, working for some company most probably not caring about Groovy at all. Maybe it sounds arrogant, but I am pretty sure, that if I had not been paid developer for Groovy those first two years of working as paid OSS-developer, even Groovy 1.0 would have not happened. If I had gotten out later I am pretty sure Groovy would have never became this stable. But times change. The project is pretty usable as it is. There are big things that should be changed in the future, but this will require working time, a big code rewrite, lot's of new documentation, convincing of people and many many other things. If that is not supposed to happen in a time frame of many years, then I do not see how this can be done. But the old codebase has some serious problems in a few places. Architecture problems, often created by me, sometimes there was no other choice back then. But things get increasingly difficult to manage and it would be a time for a rewrite. I rewrote already a lot of code in Groovy in the past. Usually that improved the situation in the long term a lot. But it is an investment for the future. Would I really care about this if I am not serious about the success of Groovy? Maybe not really. If you just help to get some fast success, then surely not. And for doing the boring and difficult to fix stuff, most people have to be serious.

Turns out, that unless there is a perspective for more developers in fulltime, I cannot become serious about Groovy anymore. It would frustrate me too much. Given the chance again to work fulltime on Groovy, would I take it? Actually I am not sure. If the company doing that cares, there should be a perspective of more fulltime workers. So probably I would take the job. But such a company has not appeared. And being paid through donations? Well, I am not convinced we would get together enough money to pay more than one person long term. Even one person is difficult, unless you spend a big portion of your time to go around begging companies for donations. I really don't want to beg for my income all the time. If I had my own business and I could do Groovy work by donations instead of working with a customer so that I don't really depend on them, then it would probably be a perspective, assuming I can keep customers like that. But that would not be fulltime either. That would be maybe 50% with luck and customers I don't have. So no option either. And working fulltime, but not being serious about things too much? I think I am not the type for that. Not being serious means to me I spend my energies somewhere else or only if I am interested. With family and work I have almost zero free time. Maybe an hour here or there. But nothing really you can do much with. It would mean I would not have an outlet... no, cannot do. I would explode or go dumb.

So for the time being it looks like there is no chance for me getting fulltime on Groovy. I dare the community to fill the gaps and show they can do serious stuff in their free time. I will help with guidance through the codebase, but in the end it all depends on the community and their motivation. And maybe, if I see several contributors appearing, that do this potentially long term and that can handle me and the community. Then I might be able to get serious again... if my help then is still welcome and a company found to pay for that.