ZeroMQ forked to create Crossroads I/O

The original creators of ZeroMQ messaging software have forked ZeroMQ as Crossroads I/O. The announcement, made earlier this month, cited the trademark policy and that "the ZeroMQ community has also recently chosen to institute a light review process" as reasons for creating the fork.

ZeroMQ was created by Martin Sustrik and Martin Lucina in 2010 to take a different approach to messaging by extending the socket API. Sustrick and Lucina say that they now object to the trademark and review policies instituted by iMatix, who own ZeroMQ. iMatix's CEO Pieter Hintjens congratulated the developers saying "It's nice to see the LGPL in action".

Sustrick and Lucina, along with some members of the ZeroMQ community, have created the Crossroads I/O fork, which, like ZeroMQ, is licensed under the LGPLv3. The project's goals are to serve as a user-space implementation of messaging, educate developers about distributed messaging, design for global, 20-year use cases, and encourage a commercial ecosystem to grow around the project. Specifically, they wish to be vendor neutral and implement a "liberal (e.g. Linux-style) trademark policy" that allows use of the trademark by third parties.

As a fork of ZeroMQ, Crossroads I/O also offers a drop-in ZeroMQ compatibility mode which can be enabled at build time. The developers have already made a number of changes to thread management, fixed a number of ZeroMQ bugs and added more tests in Crossroads I/O 1.0.0. One change in governance means that changes to the code will be posted as patches to the mailing list which will then be reviewed by the developers.

Crossroads I/O is available to download as source which will compile on POSIX-compatible and Windows platforms. The code can also be found on github but, due to the governance change, the developers do not accept pull requests.

(djwm)