What kind of contract does VMWare use to sponsor open source projects? Because up until now I thought sponsoring and buying ownership were different things.
IANAL, but my understanding is that if the project is initiated and developed by an employee using company resources on "company time", then ownership of the work is automatically granted to the company, as a "work for hire". With the exception of patent rights, that is, which are nonetheless assigned to the company as a matter of course in standard employee contracts. So no special contract is needed if the creator of a project is an employee.
There is a very subtle but important point here. He worked for VMware so he had an employment agreement with VMware. That may have conveyed rights to things he worked on to the company, so even working on an open source project, his work is 'owned' by the folks who pay him.
I am not a lawyer, personal circumstances led me to do a lot of research on this topic and consult with both a lawyer who was versed in employment law and one who specialized in Intellectual Property law to see what was what. And in California your employer can claim ownership of anything you create or "enhance" which is either done on company time, or with company resources, or (and this is the tricky bit) associated with the business or goals of the company.
From the posting it sounds like this is what VMware is alleging which is that they 'own' this work he did and have asked him to transfer it back to the company. I know that sounds weird to someone who might think they were working on a free software project but it is the way the law is structured.
But if it was released under an OSS license, anyone who wants can fork, rename if necessary due to trademark, preserve a little (c) vmware in the source files and do whatever they want, right?
Basically, can vmware retroactively revoke that open source license?
They can't retroactively revoke the licence, but they can claim the ownership of the brand and the various systems like the bug tracking database, which appears to be what they're doing.
As copyright owners they can change the license going forward, but that doesn't retroactively change the license for previously released versions.
eg. Vert.x versionX+1 could be modified to have a new license that doesn't allow forks and then you wouldn't be able to fork if you included any of the new stuff they added in that version, but Verx.x versionX would remain released under the previous license terms.
AFAIK vert.x was developed in the UK not California. It probably is work for hire in UK law, but agreed as open source (which suggests there is probably a contractual agreement).
