The recent announcement about the SpringSource Enterprise Maintenance Policy, effective September 2008, has caused some vigorous discussion in the community.

SpringSource Enterprise Maintenance Policy Customers who are using SpringSource Enterprise, available under a subscription, will receive maintenance releases for three years from the general availability of a major new version. These customers receive ongoing, rapid patches as well as regular maintenance releases to address bugs, security vulnerabilities and usability issues, making SpringSource Enterprise the best option for production systems. 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.

Some comments and blogs show an understanding of the new policy but there has also been a lot of misinformation and exaggeration by some others. We have created a Frequently Asked Questions document to help the Spring community and SpringSource customers to understand exactly what this means for them.

Mark Brewer