Should I have corrected your misread about the announcements? Well I would have done so if I had read it. I try to concentrate on working and what goes through the lists. I don't read blogs very often. The normal channel for me is to ask on the mailing list if there are things unclear. I then try to answer them as best as I can.

Looking at nabble a bit (I did of course not look at all your messages) I don't see what you mean with being ignored or not welcomed or ridiculed in 2006-2008. as for the back-channels, that was the situation from 2003 onwards already. back then a lot happened in IRC for example. The long discussions on the list have often only been the tip of the iceberg. As for GRegexes... it is the first time I hear about it. Remember I don't usually read many blogs and you never mentioned it on the groovy lists. So I am sorry that you have this problem. I won't say Alex is the only one at fault for this. We offered him a slow integration path of his "ideas" including a rewrite of the code, because his code was quite makeshift. He was not interested without getting money. And getting new founds from VMware is a fight, especially for Groovy. If you think VMware wants to control anything Groovy, then I think I have to tell you that this is wrong. Most of VMware doesn't even know Groovy exists. This has pros (no being bothered too much by marketing) and cons (not getting much in terms of funds). The part VMware is mostly interested in, is Grails as part of their products. And they don't care too much about what Grails does exactly either, as long as it works for them. So I really don't see VMware wanting to have everything under their control. I mean you complain also about a time long before main developers have been with VMware. From my perspective the freedom we have now is more then when there was G2One (there we always had financial problems). And before G2One is was even difficult to meet. I mean when I attended the first Paris meeting I was still student and paying everything myself.

Regarding a spec... We discuss this since... I don't know, since James had the stupid idea of doing a JSR and then not working on it. Jeremy worked a lot on it, but in the end he had to stop because of potential copyright issues with Sun. We asked them if we could take their spec and adapt it for Groovy. That of course they didn't want. Then we started with a "delta" spec. But actually this cannot work for two reasons. One is that Groovy has some quite fundamental changes of the concepts, so a simple "delta" will not do it in large parts. The other is that they too change the spec over time, making a "delta" a bit difficult. Well, ok, the later is not such a big deal, if you have some persons working on this... but we never had anyone but Jeremy. As for the spec from Guillaume... What you wrote doesn't sound quite right to me. The idea is to have a document similar to the JLS for Groovy, including code. This code is to form the TCK, and "directly" executed from that spec. Quite some tests from our test suite would then go into that spec and the spec will become part of our build, to ensure we do not accidentally change the spec with our implementation. If you want to make such a project you are welcome. But then I suggest not only looking at the very small beginnings at https://github.com/glaforge/dokspek I also suggest we discuss the exact thing on the list first - and that without letting us be blinded by emotion please.