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(Via The Fishbowl)

Unnamed PR firm for SpringSource: 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.

A lot of people have voiced their opinions about this policy, and an open revolt, a.k.a. a fork, is called for from open source advocates.

Rod Johnson and company is too smart to have not anticipated such reactions. The fact that they went ahead with the plan anyway indicates to me that they are pursuing some other goals. And the way words like "enterprise", "subscription" and "customers" are used indicates that it is money they are after.

I don't fault them for wanting to make money. It is wonderful to have paying customers for your software product, especially an open source one.

However, the policy of differentiating paying customers and community users by the releases that they may or may not receive simply goes against the grain of open source thinking. The community is rightfully "outraged." But we already know that they don't care.

The key here is the response from the paying customers. And I do think that they have some legitimate questions to ask:

• The extra patched releases that I receive after three months (but within three years), are they still open source? Can I redistribute it, with source, to the world?
• If what I receive is not open source anymore, have I been "bait-and-switched" into thinking that I'm going with open source when I selected Spring?
• SpringSource has taken the first steps of abandoning the open source community. Will the product lose its luster?
• Am I locked in? Will the subscription price go higher each year?

Once again, SpringSource is too smart to have not thought about these, and the effects on their open-source-oriented customers (that they will be gone).

That leaves only their paying customers who don't care about the open source thing that much.

Even for them, there are still some key questions:

• I know we don't care about open source. But SpringSource ought to care, they are, after all, an open source company. Why are they alienating their own community?
• They must be desperate for money. How long can they last?
• What if my biggest competitor bought SpringSource?

I'm sure Rod Johnson and company has good answers to all of the above questions.