There's nothing anywhere about Groovy moving to Apache or looking for another governance structure during the years Codehaus was winding down. It was only first mentioned online about a week after the layoffs from Pivotal were announced. Everything that was on Codehaus was already moving to Github and Guillaume Laforge's groovy-lang.org website. Moving to Apache looks like a direct response to Pivotal's layoffs.

We have not been looking for a new governance structure, that's right. That comes in the package with moving to Apache.. as would have been if we had moved to Eclipse. Moving off Codehaus had happened at that point already in several aspects. There was only JIRA, mailing lists, web page as well as a git repo mirror on Codehaus. github because of pull requests, distributions moved away because Codehaus exchanged rsync with webdav making releases take a full day, CI moved because the sponsored server allows us to test against the newest Java directly from the repository and so on.