More SpringSource grumbling

Submitted by Josh Fruhlinger on Thu, 10/02/2008 - 13:12.

Rating for this post: Select ratingPoorOkayGoodGreatAwesome

 

The community anger over SpringSource's changes to how binary versions of the popular Spring Framework will be made available to non-paying customers has been simmering along since I talked about it last week. There's been continuing kvetching about cost, and more rallying to SpringSource's defense. Spring creator Rod Johnson's been making the rounds, and this interview with him on the subject over at DZone succinctly restates the company's talking points; to me, though, even more valuable is the vibrant discussion thread attached to the interview, which gets into the nuts and bolts of how the new regime will work in ways that go beyond mere "waah, it used to be free as in beer and now it's not" whining. The biggest concern seems to be that, while the source will remain technically available, the removal of tags will make it difficult to reconstruct specific packages.

Nevertheless, SpringSource seems determined to move in a more corporate direction. The company is releasing the OSGi-based dm Server, a for-pay product, and recently hired Rob Bearden as President and COO; Bearden is a veteran of JBoss, itself a high-profile corporate open source shop.