Hello Dears,
Hope this finds all of you in good health and spirit. I am writing to share an update regarding our ongoing investment in Grails Framework, and to engage a dialogue around how all of us can work more collaboratively and intentionally to ensure that we keep the flames of our open-source innovations vibrant and everlasting.
Given industry trends and engagement, we feel that now is the time to pause innovation inside the Grails framework and focus our effort and investment in other areas.
Grails Foundation will continue to serve in the best interests of the project and the community, and we remain committed to providing commercial support to our clients and the global Grails community. More information will be forthcoming as we continue conversations with our community.
Our commitment to supporting and advancing open systems has been a significant part of our journey, started over 30 years ago. Since 1993, Object Computing has built, supported, and advanced many open source projects (e.g., ACE/TAO, Jacorb, OpenDDS, MPC, JBoss, Groovy, Grails, Micronaut . . .). In recent years, the establishment of open source product foundations (Grails Foundation, Micronaut Foundation, OpenDDS Foundation) ensure the goals of continuity and sustainability of each respective OSS product.
We love open source. We believe in building and investing in it, we believe in incorporating it into our systems, and we believe in starting with it to the extent possible so that we can all focus and conserve our efforts for the true edge of innovation. Investing in open source is not a straight line to revenue … it is an essential component of technology that empowers, for our clients and the global communities we serve.
Over the past several years, we have poured significantly into the development and advancement of Grails, among other open source projects. In 2015, Object Computing stepped up as a leading contributor and steward for Grails. Since that time, we have invested over $7M to advance Grails from version 3.0 of the Framework to its current state, recently sharing with the community the release of Grails 6.2. Since 2015 we have been the primary financial sponsor for Grails, enabling the project to grow and adapt to support the communities it serves. Grails has had a tremendous impact in the 16+ years since Grails 1.0 was released, and we celebrate everything that the community has done to make that possible.
In recent years, we have seen a marked decline in enterprise adoption and commercial investment, beyond the ongoing contributions of Object Computing. We cannot go the distance alone.
Open Source cannot survive without a vibrant community. A sustainable open-source project is fueled by a community that:
- Contributes issues, bug fixes, other code and innovation to the software
- Engages with the product team to contribute and drive innovation and growth of the product
- Uses and battle-tests the software
- Contributes documentation and user guides and other learning tools to the ecosystem
- Consumes services (product support, training, etc) which creates value and funding mechanisms
- Evangelizes and drives adoption of the software
- Provides a stable source of financial and technical contributions, ideally through multiple channels (individuals and corporations)
No doubt, the products and projects that enjoy active community engagement and support will resultantly be and persist as the most successful and useful.
We are incredibly grateful to all of you, who embrace, contribute to, invest in, and otherwise support and evangelize open source projects. We invite you to reach out to us to discuss how together we can combine our collective force and resources to advance the use and benefit of these technologies that we all enjoy.
Sincerely yours,
Gina M Bremehr, CEO
