SpringSource Enterprise Maintenance Policy

(revised October 7th, 2008)

Effective immediately SpringSource is implementing a new maintenance policy for Spring. The policy provides the Spring community with access to the latest Spring source code and binary releases and provides production users with a long-term, stable application platform to build, run and manage their Spring-powered applications. Rod Johnson’s blog provides a detailed description of the thought process behind the change. The revised policy is as follows

Maintenance Policy:

1. SpringSource will make regular source and binary releases of the current major version of Spring available to the community until the next major version is available (defined as a release candidate for that version). After this point we will make all bug fixes and improvements available to the community in the current version only. Any back-ports will only be made available to subscription customers
2. SpringSource Enterprise customers who wish to continue to receive maintenance releases for previous versions of Spring will receive these releases for three years from the initial GA release of that version.

The three month window, described in the previous policy, is no longer relevant. There is no defined window for how long binary releases will be available with this revised policy.

As an example, as of this date (October 7th, 2008), Spring 2.5.x remains the current major version, so under this policy we will be releasing Spring 2.5.6 to the community very shortly. Once we release Spring 3.0 RC1 all fixes for community releases will become part of the 3.0 development trunk. We will focus on 3.0 development so that we can release 3.0 as soon as possible after the first milestone.

For more information, please read the Frequently Asked Questions document.