Summary: The recently announced SpringSource Enterprise Maintenance Policy came as a surprise to many Java developers, in some circles sparking anger and calls for a Spring fork. One factor in the controversy may be the relationship between the lesser known commercial vendor, SpringSource, and its widely popular open source product, the Spring framework. In this discussion with Andrew Glover, SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson talks about how his company walks the line between commercial success and its driving role in open source projects such as the Spring framework and Tomcat. Similarly, he explains what factors might cause developers to migrate from Spring's strictly free and open source products to the commercial, and costly, SpringSource Enterprise package. Johnson also discusses the new, OSGi-based SpringSource Application Platform, which he says is designed not for where the Java enterprise market has been, but for where it is going.
