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20080919 Friday September 19, 2008

RE: How Open Source is Spring? Peter Mularien has a very well written post titled How Open Source is Spring?: An Analytical Investigation:

This post is to expand on some of the thoughts I posted on the SpringSource Blog in response to Rod Johnson's excellent description of the SpringSource business model and its commitment to development of open source software.

Now that SpringSource has shown an ability to crank out new product releases on a seemingly weekly basis, I wanted to reflect on where Spring is positioned in the Java open source community, and how open the Spring Core project is to work done by the public.

The hypothesis of my experiment occurred to me when I happened to be reviewing Spring JIRA assignments one day. I was curious whether, following the bug assignments, the majority of development on the "Spring Core" projects (including Spring MVC and what we would consider "classic Spring") is performed solely by SpringSource employees.

Peter's post is near and dear to me because I'm doing a What's coming in Spring 3.0 talk at the Colorado Software Summit in October. The only information I was able to find on Spring 3.0 is from random blog posts and Juergen's presentation. When I give talks about technologies, I prefer to dig in and try them before talking about it. With Spring 3.0's source code nowhere to be found, this is very difficult to do.

I really hope Spring 3.0 becomes available in early October. If it does, I hope to upgrade AppFuse, AppFuse Light and Spring Kickstart. If it doesn't, my talk will most likely be a regurgitation of what Juergen's slides have and that's just not right. Posted in Java at Sep 19 2008, 09:54:48 AM MDT 14 Comments

Comments:

And then something like this comes up: http://www.springsource.com/node/558 Makes you think...

Posted by GB on September 19, 2008 at 02:36 PM MDT #

hi there, http://www.springsource.com/node/558 it's time to do a CentOS on Spring. Spring seems to be headed more closed than JBoss. I was hoping/thinking that it would be the other way around. BR, ~A

Posted by anjan bacchu on September 19, 2008 at 04:38 PM MDT #

Today's article on TSS about the Spring team (per interpretation) holding back fixes could pose a barrier to its acceptance with some of my clients... http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=50727 Am I being reactionary? How do others feel about this?

Posted by Matthew McCullough on September 19, 2008 at 05:13 PM MDT #

This is disappointing. This is like "thank you guys (the community) to help to build Spring. Now, Spring is a well established product and it's time for us to make more money, so, please paid !" Read also this article: http://www.mularien.com/blog/2008/09/19/how-open-source-is-spring-an-analytical-investigation/ Really disappointing

Posted by Pascal on September 21, 2008 at 01:12 AM MDT #

Looks like "déjà vu" with ExtJS license...

Posted by Nicoz on September 22, 2008 at 02:58 AM MDT #

It's sad. SpringSource is actually leaving the Open Source community with this move. There is no way we could use Spring in our projects anymore. First the subscription in very expensive - out of reach for smaller companies. Second, we can't deliver the Spring jars to our customers without a special deal or our customers also pay the subscription. Without paying there will be no bugfixes. Well, technicaly you could try to find the changes you need from the source repository, but how would you know it it will really work? What are the alternatives? Can you use Guice as a replacement?

Posted by Markus on September 24, 2008 at 03:17 AM MDT #

Maybe your talk at CSS 2008 should center around the community's reaction to the "wonderful" news. And possibly gather signatures for Rod to convince him to at least tag the releases to keep the wolves at bay? See you in Keystone.

Posted by Lyle Anderson on September 24, 2008 at 08:28 PM MDT #

Rod and all the Spring Source are a bunch of SOB's, Spring is KAPUT!!.

Posted by Chekke on September 25, 2008 at 09:55 AM MDT #

Yes of course you can replace Spring IoC with Guice.

Posted by Chekke on September 25, 2008 at 09:57 AM MDT #

My initial reaction to the news that SpringSource were no longer going to provide free unlimited support was one of disappointment. They certainly are not doing themselves any favours in their handling of 'champions' like Matt.

Another way of looking at Peter Mularien's analysis is that Rod and the team at SpringSource have developed Spring. It is and continues to be open-source as defined by the Open Source Initiative . Rod's responses over on TSS to the backlash are concilliatory. Hopefully they will address their minds to how to work with folks like Matt - early access to new releases under a NDA?

In the meantime you have the source - fix it, enhance it or fork it!

Posted by Gerry King on October 01, 2008 at 09:57 AM MDT #

Unlimited support? I have never expected that from an Open Source project without paying.

But removing the possibility to get bugfixes from CVS is not up to normal OSS standard.

I also read Rod's replies in the TSS thread. He opened up for tagging minor releases of the latest major version. That would be OK for me. Then if you want tested and "blessed" releases of old versions, you will have to pay. I haven't heard anything more about it after that. I hope they will say something publicly soon. We are cosidering our options and it takes time to even plan for a migration to another IoC framework.

One other thing is the crazy price for support. 16,000 ?? That's what we pay for our office in central Stockholm...

Posted by Markus on October 01, 2008 at 10:26 AM MDT #

From the release of Spring Security 2.0 last night, I think, we will have minor release for the latest version.

Posted by donny on October 03, 2008 at 12:05 AM MDT #

See comment from (SpringSource) Adam FitzGerald at http://forum.springframework.org/showthread.php?t=60920

Posted by Pascal on October 03, 2008 at 12:14 AM MDT #

[Trackback] In a little over two weeks, my favorite conference begins in Keystone, Colorado. The reason I like it so much is because it's an annual gathering (this will be my 4th year) with friends and it's somewhat like a vacation, except you get to learn a lot...

Posted by Raible Designs on October 09, 2008 at 10:46 AM MDT #

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Matt Raible is the Lead UI Architect at LinkedIn. The opinions on this site are mine, not my employers.
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