Opening in the Spring conflict?

On the end of the TSS thread Rod Johnson seems to be willing to consider a compromise with the Spring community.

The suggestion put out by Greg Matthews was that SpringSource would provide tags on maintenance releases only for the most current major version of Spring. So when Spring 3.0 is released, users can use CVS tags to download 3.0.*, up until 3.1 is released.

“e.g. no more tags on the 2.0 branch, continued tags on 2.5 until 3.0 comes out, then no more tags on the 2.5 branch.”

Builds made from these tags could be uploaded to the Maven repos.

Bug fixes for older releases will have to be done manually by patching.

Rod Johnson:

“The idea of tagging the current branch until the next major release comes out is an interesting compromise, and we will consider it.

I would love to have a genuinely collaborative dialog with the community on fine-tuning a fair and balanced outcome, and I’m happy that the discussion now seems to be trending that way.”

I think this is reasonable. It is what I would expect by an Open Srouce project. Normally OSS projects are mostly interested in the newsest version and often not that interested in maintaining old stuff.

I could live with this. But I don’t have the same trust anymore. What will they do next?

To mend the broken confidence, I think SpringSource needs to reach out to the community. Perhaps they should establish a contract with the community, “Community Bill of Rights”.