Ever since the news came to the surface about Spring commercial offering and their new release cycle policy a lot of people have blog about it and a majority of developers are not happy with how SpringSource is putting out there. So, the question that comes to my mind after reading all these is this “Will Spring Die ?”, I’m trying to think objectively when thinking about this situation but sometimes when you feel very strong about something it is hard to be rationale, but I will give it a go.

1.  Spring will not die in the corporate environment as you can imagine most of the enterprise application that is/was written is using Spring in one way or the other. Even the application that I’m currently working on is using Spring. The question that will pops up is how much of Spring is your enterprise using ?, if you are using the full stack of  Spring portfolio, then it makes sense to invest in their support offering as it’s still cheaper to buy the support rather than re-work the application to use another framework offerings. The cost benefits analysis is very much in favour of Spring. From the enterprise perspective their main concern is they don’t have to pay for the support if they don’t need to, and I’m sure most of us will never need to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Spring unless if there is a bug that needs to be fixed.

2. Spring will be out of flavour sooner or later with the open source community, and I think it has been like that since early this year. Sometimes if I think about it the open source community have their reasons for this, but sometimes also I can’t put my hand on the reason, my gut feeling is telling me is that the community feel betrayed and cheated in one way or the other. I know that people who are involved directly or indirectly with the Spring project can attest to this point. What will happen down the track is that developers will now steer clear of Spring as much as possible and looks for alternative. There are options out there that’s for sure it’s just a matter of time for that other framework to become the next big thing.

3. Other frameworks that were known but didn’t get the exposure now have a better chance to arise to the surface, the threat to Spring is an opportunity for other - remember SWOT ?.  There are mainly 3 main key strength of Spring - community, product portfolio and first in line. These 3 things always move hand in hand and if one of them move slightly to the south you can see what will happen. For the open source community they don’t care too much about product portfolio as they are not interested in some parts of Spring and not others.

4. Third party vendors who uses Spring heavily such as WebLogic will not move away from Spring as a matter of fact they will have an edge in the market with the offering put on the table by SpringSource. They will have the opportunity to capture the market because they are able to sell to the client the latest release and fixes and have the support offerings backed up by the creator itself. So it’s question that is easily answered.

One of thing that really surprises me was the support cost that was written in an article by Ryan de Laplante when I saw the amount of money you have to pay for the support I almost fell out of my chair. I think they should not quote that high considering that he is only using some part of the Spring project.

I think we as developers who are not new in open source should have seen this coming, as it’s only natural that once somebody invested in your idea or product they are expecting a return back on that investment, and this is what is happening to Spring.