Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Change of course at SpringSource

Glad to see an announcement from Rod. Honestly, what took so long?

We are amending our maintenance policy in the light of community feedback. We will make regular binary releases from the Spring trunk available to the community, with no 3 month window. For each version of Spring, community releases will be available while it remains the trunk or until the next version is stable.

Once we have published a release candidate for a new version of a project, we will typically not release further tags or binary builds of earlier versions of the project to the open source community. Such releases will be available for three years to SpringSource Enterprise customers.

This is the type of a policy that I would be completely comfortable with. Initial version seemed a little out of character and rushed. Call me a "Spring Fan Boy" but I am mighty happy with the news today.

1 comment:

Joel Confino said...

The maintenance policy change is good, but it is not enough. This will stop the rush of projects away from Spring, but will not completely stem the tide for 2 reasons:

#1: The new policy requires that you stay on the most current release, and projects with longer development cycles won't be able to do that. I would have much preferred the better policy of support for current release and previous release to allow a smooth transition. No one wants to be pushed to migrate to a new "1.0" release.

#2: This sounds corny, but the trust has been broken. SpringSource has shown the will to change the rules of the game at any time. The new policy is workable abiet barely. But what if they make it worse next month? Are you willing to bet your project or startup company that they won't?