I've been interested in Fantom for a while and to me it seems like a much saner alternative to something like Scala even though that seems to have/had more attention.

I took a little time to look at the site in earnest today and I am struggling to find details around who owns the language and how decisions are made. I see an unfamiliar "academic" license and that Andy and Brian appear to be the BDFLs of Fantom. Is that right?

So what would occur were the bothers to disagree on the future of the language? Could the language be forked if there was a decision to change the licensing to be more proprietary? Is there venture capital funding behind this effort? Etc...

Let me be clear that I'm not looking for any particular answer here or intending to critique your choices (although I do reserve that right). Anyone who creates something has the right to do as they will with it. The point is that in order to seriously consider recommending this tool at my place of work, I will need to know these things. On a side note, making this information more easily found may improve the uptake of this tool (depending on the answers, of course.) If this information is easily found and I'm just being dense, please point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance,

-Matt

Matt,

Andy and Brian appear to be the BDFLs of Fantom. Is that right?

Yes that would be correct :) There is currently a core team of three people with commit access, and then a bunch of others who routinely provide patches. I like to run it very much like an IETF committee which usually means design discussion on the forum until a fairly broad consensus is reached. If you go back in time on forum, you can see how the process has worked for most of the major changes over the last four to five years.

So what would occur were the bothers to disagree on the future of the language? Could the language be forked if there was a decision to change the licensing to be more proprietary?

That is true of any open source license which has an academic license. Although we would never change the license to be more proprietary

Is there venture capital funding behind this effort?

Well if it was VC funded then you should be worried :) Its essentially funded by a commercial company SkyFoundry which is privately held by us, although its also a personal love of mine

Brian-

Thanks for the response. It's good enough for me to do so more research and experimentation.

-Matt