Comments on: SpringSource Killing the Golden Goose?

By: SpringSource Reworks Maintenance Policy « A Public Scratchpad

SpringSource Reworks Maintenance Policy « A Public Scratchpad — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:56:58 +0000

[...] 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?), [...]

By: Matt W

Matt W — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:47:26 +0000

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.

By: Markus

Markus — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:34:50 +0000

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.

By: Changement de la strat�gie de maintenance de Spring Framework - @Repository("djo") - Club d'entraide des développeurs francophones

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 00:41:05 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: David

David — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 22:25:39 +0000

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 .

By: Daniel Gredler

Daniel Gredler — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:14:25 +0000

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!

By: Mark Brewer

Mark Brewer — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:43:46 +0000

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.