Under the new policy all bugfixes after three months will be available only in subscribed releases (the patches will still be available in the open source trunk, but you’ll have to compile them yourself).
This is a very expected move from Spring after the VC investment. Their previous business model was largely based on high class consulting and training. Obviously this just doesn’t scale. Now they are searching for new ways to sell licenses and subscription.
One of them is the new Spring Application Platform (renamed from the Spring Application Server). As far as I checked it it’s a relatively thin layer over OSGi, which doesn’t stop them from charging money for it. To be fair OSGi did need something like this to be useful to the larger community and if the tools will also be up to scratch it may be a useful project.
The new policy is just a part of that move. There is of course no reason why someone couldn’t just set up a public repository with the compiled releases unencumbered with Spring trademarking, but it will take some work. This is exactly what happened to the RedHat Linux wrt YellowDog Linux. This leaves me wondering if the “spring” in the package names is considered trademarked, because otherwise it would be impossible to produce untrademarked binary compatible releases, which kinda defeats the whole purpose of the open source.
What is the next move we can expect from SpringSource? They are also already offering companies to certify themselves for a hefty price to be “Spring Certified Solutions”. They also certify developers and may start to certify whole shops for “Spring-Enabled Process” or somesuch (if they’re not doing it yet). What we may yet come to see is
- Making access to the Spring forums and FAQ paid
- Making full documentation available only for a fee
- Making full examples available only for a fee
- Making Spring IDE commercial
- Making downloads available only to registered users with aggressive upsale.
- Making a Spring job board available only to certified developers and enterprises. (I was always surprised that this haven’t been done much in the industry)
- And so on. Take any practice from Oracle/IBM/Sun and make it more aggressive, since SpringSource needs to be making money yesterday.
One very important question that came to me is if there’s any contributors to the Spring framework outside the SpringSource? Unless they have signed a copyright surrender agreement the whole commercial release is a license change without the agreement of a copyright holder. Given that the Spring guys seem to like to abuse the community understanding of open source without given much though to laws, it would be nice to see them bitten in the ass with it.