Spring Framework License Change

20 Sep 2008

I'm hearing a huge buzz across the blogsphere about the maintenance changes to the Spring Framework. It appears at first interpretation that only the first three bug fix drops will be community available, and the others will be available only to paying enterprise customers.

Perhaps more concerning and going hand in hand with this is that largely only internal Spring employees are working on the codebase fixing bugs. If the community were allowed to be more involved, perhaps this strange commercialization positioning would not be necessary. Lastly, the venerable Matt Raible can't even get access to the Spring 3.0 source code. If it is an open source product, where's the source?

Please offer your comments and feedback. I'm interested to hear even more opinions on this change.

Update 2008-09-23 3:30 PM: More buzz on this at DZone.com from some respected names.

Update 2008-09-23 8:30 PM: And yet another update from the SpringSource team directly in the form of an FAQ.