As per this post on TSS, SpringSource have announced a new maintenance policy:
Customers who are using SpringSource Enterprise, available under a subscription, will receive maintenance releases for three years from the general availability of a major new version. These customers receive ongoing, rapid patches as well as regular maintenance releases to address bugs, security vulnerabilities and usability issues, making SpringSource Enterprise the best option for production systems.
After a new major version of Spring is released, community maintenance updates will be issued for three months to address initial stability issues. Subsequent maintenance releases will be available to SpringSource Enterprise customers. Bug fixes will be folded into the open source development trunk and will be made available in the next major community release of the software.
Now, there are only two ways I can read this:
- After the initial three-month window following a major release, bug fixes will not be available to non-paying customers until the next major release.
- After the initial three-month window following a major release, bug fixes will be available to non-paying customers only via public source control — not via real, numbered releases.
If we take the Spring 2.5.x series of releases as an example, we have the following time line:
Spring 2.5.0: 2007-11-19
Spring 2.5.1: 2008-01-09
Spring 2.5.2: 2008-02-29
Spring 2.5.3: 2008-04-06
Spring 2.5.4: 2008-04-28
Spring 2.5.5: 2008-06-23
Applying the three-month rule to these releases, we can see that the community around this open source project would only have access to Spring 2.5.0, 2.5.1 and 2.5.2 (if we’re generous and round up).
I’m not sure whether or not the community would have access via public source control to the bugfixes included in the subsequent releases prior to the next major release, but as far as I can tell the best-case scenario is that we would have to build the subsequent releases ourselves, rather than just download the JARs directly.
Additionally, this policy takes effect immediately. If you’re not paying SpringSource, you may not get access to the upcoming 2.5.6 release…
Somebody tell me I’m misreading this.
UPDATE: Here.
Mark Brewer said,
September 19, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Daniel, your second read is correct. We will continue all development (including fixes) in the public source tree. We will produce releases, after the initial three months, for Enterprise (support and subscription) customers.
The policy also provides for an extended – 3 years – amount of support for the Enterprise customers. Which enables them be assured that we will fix bugs that are found in older (non-current) versions of the product.
Daniel Gredler said,
September 19, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Thanks for the update, Mark. I don’t begrudge you the ability to make money off of Spring, but I sure wish that there was a different way. There’s no telling how many different crazy versions of Spring are going to get uploaded to the central Maven repo now!
David said,
September 20, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I guess someone else will have to start producing releases of Spring with the fixes and just push them into the Maven repos. This should be an easy task I guess, since the source is still freely available
.
Changement de la stratégie de maintenance de Spring Framework - @Repository("djo") - Club d'entraide des développeurs francophones said,
September 20, 2008 at 7:41 pm
[...] dans le trunk public de Spring, même après le délai des 3 premiers mois (Source : commentaire de Marc Brewar sur ce blog). Seulement, SpringSource ne publierait plus des releases officiels que pour ses abonnés. [...]
Markus said,
September 22, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Making our own releases will be hard, since Rod said in the TSS thread that there will not be any tags for the maintenance releases in the CVS.
So what would a maintenance release be made from? Based on guesswork and dates?
It doesn’t feel good. For a simple DI framework, I wouldn’t mind, but Spring wants to be a complete stack. I don’t like to depend on it, when SpringSource acts like this.
Matt W said,
September 24, 2008 at 11:47 am
Markus said:
“Making our own releases will be hard, since Rod said in the TSS thread that there will not be any tags for the maintenance releases in the CVS.”
That’s the key point that so many of the “it’s no big deal” folks seem to miss. Without tags it’s a crapshoot. SpringSource’s own FAQ states that the maintenance release they provide to paying customers are tested using resources unavailable to the community. Since there will be no tags in the repository there’s absolutely no way for anyone not paying up to know how well tested the code they’re checking out really is. Anyone who says that this isn’t a major change from the way things were is kidding themselves.
SpringSource Reworks Maintenance Policy « A Public Scratchpad said,
October 7, 2008 at 2:56 pm
[...] 7, 2008 at 2:56 pm (Java, Spring) A couple of weeks ago SpringSource modified their maintenance policy. The change was a significant move in that it stripped non-paying users of certain perks (rights?), [...]