You'd also need to understand that not all full-time Groovy and Grails developers make equal contributions. Funding the 2 technical workers on Groovy might make sense for a business, but due to ownership problems related to the brand, codebase, support, channels, and what not, disentangling these 2 workers from the whole mess is a legal nightmare. Perhaps there's something similar with Grails, but I don't know much about that one. Pivotal obviously decided simply terminating funding was more profitable than trying to split off a separate business and sell it all to someone else.