After former VMware engineer Tim Fox joined Red Hat as a principal software engineer, he was handed a letter asking him to transfer the ownership of Vert.x to his former employer.

The open-source project Fox led during his stint at VMware is touted as an event-driven app framework for Java Virtual Machine developers. The code is compatible with several popular web programming languages; it scales well, and it offers “real concurrency and unrivalled performance” according to the official website.

Fox broke the news that VMware is taking over in a brief Web post earlier this week.  The former RabbitMQ developer said that while he no longer retains ownership of Vert.x, he will continue to manage it and maintain an active role in the community. He also wrote that he is “very concerned about this turn of events” and even more so about the future of the project, a statement that quickly triggered a response from VMware and Red Hat.

From ZDNet:

“It’s important that we try to allay any fears and uncertainty that the community has about the vert.x project and state clearly that VMware and Red Hat are still very much in active discussion regarding how best to support the vert.x project going forwards,” Mark Little, a vice-president at Red Hat, and Alexis Richardson, a senior director at VMware, wrote in a joint post to the forum. “

To avoid an extended fight, Fox has transferred ownership of the Vert.x domain, blog, Google group, and github page over to VMware.

VMware has a solid open-source record to back up these promises. Together with EMC the virtualization giant recently announced plans to spin off nearly 1,500 employees and most of its cloud assets to create a new subsidiary with a very specific purpose: accelerating the growth of Cloud Foundry, Spring, and several other homegrown open-source solutions.