Why is SpringSource introducing a maintenance policy?
As SpringSource technologies have grown in depth and breadth to meet the demands from the community, we must invest heavily in sustaining engineering (maintenance), product build and quality assurance/testing aspects of Spring. With more organizations running on previous releases of our software, we must recoup the cost of supporting all previous branches of the software with ongoing maintenance releases. Our Enterprise customers pay for the ability to remain on a stable production platform as well as other benefits, while open source users can use the availability of the source code to maintain their versions. SpringSource’s Enterprise customers expect to receive the same degree of support & maintenance on our products that they receive from their other software providers. This includes a commitment to maintain and update older releases of our products, which had not been a policy until now.
