They're doing it because their existing "foundation", Codehaus, is closing down. But there could be another reason they've suddenly fast-tracked the process right now...
4 days after Pivotal's announcement that they're stopping funding for Groovy and Grails developers after March 2015, Grails P.M. Graeme Rocher published a Q&A at http://jaxenter.com/grails-future-113958.html beginning "We are investigating a number of different avenues for sponsorship of the development of the language and framework. The Groovy and Grails team are a team of 6 engineers and for any company hiring 6 engineers is a significant investment..."
The Grails P.M. is linking both Groovy and Grails into a single product and "team", and suggesting not all of the current team of 6 will be funded from a new source. The Groovy P.M. would be the most likely to miss out on funding if only, say, 5 are funded because he doesn't bring any technical skills to the table -- he's a manager relying on 2 others to do the programming work. To counter Rocher's attempt to make Groovy and Grails a single team under one P.M., the Groovy P.M. is suddenly fast-tracking the move of Groovy to some other formal entity to keep his position as head. Rocher, however, is the one most likely to secure funding for Groovy/Grails, and if one or both of the actual programmers who build Groovy get offered a, say, 1-year contract, they won't hesitate to jump aboard Rocher's management of Groovy. All this talk of joining a foundation would come to nothing.
In fact, this Pivotal announcement could even be a ruse set up by Rocher to dump the Groovy P.M. and maybe even 1 or 2 others, under cover of "managing to secure an extension of funding from Pivotal for a smaller team at the last moment". Control of both Groovy and Grails would also give Rocher more leverage over Gradle in any buy out talks. Time will show us what's really going on.
