SpringSource travesty!

Or Not? It Depends! There was a lot of speculation and outcry at the initial announcement. Just read theserverside fireside chat. Both Rod Johnson and Mark Brewer from SpringSource dropped by to provide some explanation. I am still hungry for explicit details.

1. How IP of the enterprise supported changes be handled or if there will be a difference at all?
2. Will there be tags made as point releases are made to the paying customers? I would really, really, really hate to go off the trunk only.
   
3. How transparent will the changes made to support paying customer be? Will there be a jira link, release notes, some sort of description of the change? That would be crucial when building of the trunk. Personally I do not have bandwidth to monitor FishEye.

I do not think that this is a sell out by SpringSource but I am biased. I have spent the last 5 years using Spring Framework. Now I can hardly write an "enterprise" app of any size without it. I got lazy about looking for an alternative because Spring is so damn good.

I am yet to see a huge issue with announcement outside of inconvenience. Most of the customers that I work with pick a version and stick with it for a while. Lets say they have 2.5.2 and it will take an act of deity to move them to 2.5.5 unless it it the next major internal release.

So lets wait and see. If SpringSource does pull an Ext, there is a solid foundation that can still be forked and developed by the community. I really hope it will never come to that.

Further reading:

1. SpringSource manifesto
2. Rod on Open Source contibutors
3. Rod on Enterprise Open Source (Presentaton Slides from Emerging Technology for Enterprise Conference 2007)
4. Craig Walls thoughts