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Re: What the new $pringSource maintenance policy means to you

« H E email
posted Tuesday, 23 September 2008

I really have to respond to Craig Walls's assertion that not much has changed.

In my opinion, however much you try to spin it, a lot has changed including:

  • Potentially (nine?) months without binary releases - many open source projects would not be successful if they didn't release regularly.
  • After three months, developers who need a bug fix will have to build from potentially unstable source without any coordination with the developers - pretty challenging to do. Or you have to pay what sounds like a lot of money from the perspective of a small business for $pringSource support.
  • An apparent recharacterization of much of the community (myself included btw), as freeloaders. This one is a complete shocker. The number of binary downloads used to be a source of pride for the Spring open-source project and is, ironically, one of the things that VCs look at before investing.

Perhaps this is just the nature of the free market but it offends my sense of fair play.

So in a practical sense, what does this mean? In the short-term there is not a lot many of us can do. Some will probably pay up. Others, will cross their fingers and hope that everything will be ok without support. Yet others are probably considering the existing alternatives to Spring; or perhaps, more interestingly, thinking about forking Spring or building a potential successor.

Ironically, on some recent projects I strayed from the POJO path and had started using Spring annotations for dependency injection. That's something I am going to have to reconsider. If nothing else these recent developments are a poignant reminder of why POJOs are a good idea: decouple your business logic from the infrastructure frameworks.

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comments (4)


1. Craig Walls left...
Tuesday, 23 September 2008 12:20 pm

Count me in the ranks of Spring freeloaders. I've not paid a dime for anything Spring provides. I never intended "freeloader" to be taken in such a negative tone, but in hindsight, I can see how I should've known that it would be taken that way.

The point is, that the Spring Community is made up of two categories of people: Those who pay for Spring support and services and those who do not. Those who pay should expect (and even demand) the binary builds. Those who do not pay may expect them, but there is no entitlement implied.

I'll admit that I'm not thrilled about this change in direction. But in the end, it doesn't impact me much, as I frequently build Spring from the trunk. I eagerly await binary builds with my desired fixes in them, but I have no expectations that they'll be available immediately.

In my opinion, there are two things that SpringSource could offer that would iron our my only concerns with the new policy: (1) tag the releases in SVN/CVS to make it easier for everyone to build. However, if they were to do that, nobody should assume any level of support or guarantees as to the quality of the code behind the tag. (2) If, after three months, I contribute a fix back to Spring that ends up in a maintenance release, then I should be given a free download of the first maintenance build that my fix goes into. This would encourage the community to give back.

In any event, you make some valid points. I'm not sure that I agree that they're as serious as you make them out to be, but I'll agree that they're valid. And again, it wasn't my intention to paint the entire Spring community as freeloaders in a negative sense. I just grow very weary of a large percentage of the populace (both in software and in general) believing that they are entitled to something that they did not pay for.


2. Chris Richardson left...
Tuesday, 23 September 2008 12:36 pm :: http://chris-richardson.blog-city.com/

I'd certainly be happier with svn tagging of releases.

The question of what to expect from open-source software is an interesting one. There is a lot of freely available software: JDK, Ecliise, countless libraries and tools. All of them have become successful because they provide quality software and a steady stream of binary releases. But what should a user expect? Nothing?

More generally, should open-sourcing software simply be viewed as a tactic to gain a dominant market share. And, then once that goal has been accomplished should the vendor then demand payment for what was previously available for free? Would that be a better mindset for a consumer of open source software to have?


3. Markus left...
Wednesday, 24 September 2008 1:43 am

If you are not using Spring MVC and if you stayed away from annotations (plain POJOs is not a bad idea....), how easy would it be to move to something like Guice?

I see a huge market for migrations guides from Spring to Guice or plain JEE.


4. Daniel Fernández left...
Wednesday, 24 September 2008 12:28 pm

That's the broken concept: fair play.

The problem here is not whether they "can" do it (of course they can!) or whether the conditions in which we the "freeloaders" are left are enough good or bad with those three months of maintenance releases...

...the problem here is crossing a line. Offering value-added services is great, but taking something away from the community which raised you where you are now, whatever it is what you take... that is a line being crossed. Doing something like this shows the community something: SpringSource's priorities. And guess what? Community isn't in first place.

They now need to grow, they need money (as all companies do), and so they come with this 3-month restriction. Ok, but... what if tomorrow they need MORE money? Will it be 1 month? Will it be no binaries at all? Why not? How can we be SURE it won't?

Many of us have "married" an important part of our careers to some technologies, and Spring is one of them. This is, sadly, a crisis.