SpringSource acquired by VMware

[adam.fitzgerald]

Today SpringSource announced that it is being acquired by VMware, the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter. Rod Johnson covers the details of the acquisition in his blog post: SpringSource: Chapter Two. In particular, he gives a special message to the community:

Sleep easy – our commitment to open source practices, licenses and traditions will remain unchanged. We expect our contributions to open source to increase. Our open source projects will retain their commitment to enabling user choice. Spring will retain the portability between deployment environments that empowers users.

The combination of the two companies will provide some incredibly exciting technology and make development for cloud based solutions even easier. Congratulations to Rod and all the SpringSource technologists that have worked so hard to deliver great technology and build a successful business.

[Sounie]

So, what am I missing?

SpringSource has acquired a few companies that have had certain obvious synergies with its products and the needs of its customers - fair enough.

Now VMWare's acquiring SpringSource - where'd that come from?

I'm no business expert, but I get the impression that mergers and acquisitions where companies grow to swallow other companies, and then get swallowed by an even bigger company tend to be followed by "right"-sizing and changes in direction.

Something's got to give.

That's just my 2 cents.

[adam.fitzgerald]

Now VMWare's acquiring SpringSource - where'd that come from?

I think Rod's blog post does an excellent job of describing the technical and business vision shared by SpringSource and VMware:

Working together with VMware we plan on creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds.

While every acquisition is different, the distinct lack of overlap between VMware's existing products and SpringSource's current products bodes well for an integration that is additive or even multiplicative rather than a rationalization as you suggest. Clearly SpringSource and VMware both believe there is more to be gained together than apart.

[papphammar]

As a 5+ year SpringSource user and (former) SpringSource advocate we think this is tragic. We trusted SpringSource and the people behind it to be good custodians of the trust the community has placed in them and the project. We are certainly not willing to keep investing in technology controlled by VMWare.

Right now we're glad that the projects we've started to move to products like DM Server can be re-directed towards some community-driven alternative. We will now have to dedicate time an resources to phasing out the spring IoC container from many large code bases. The positive in all this is that we can now move on to a platform that does the important stuff well and lacks the bloat and cruft that has begun to accumulate in Spring.

[karldmoore]

As a 5+ year SpringSource user and (former) SpringSource advocate we think this is tragic. We trusted SpringSource and the people behind it to be good custodians of the trust the community has placed in them and the project. We are certainly not willing to keep investing in technology controlled by VMWare.

Have I missed something? Why has that trust been eroded? It's still open source, there's still a community, sure VMWare is now in the picture but who would you sooner own SpringSource? SpringSource is a commercial entity so they are in the business of making money from the technology. That money pays for it's development. Surely everyone presumed there would be a big money purchase at some point......

What will it mean for the little developer using Spring, well hopefully nothing negative. I've read Rod's blog post, I guess we'll wait and see. Presumably you're thinking the worst.

[papphammar]

It would be logical to assume VMWare did this deal to leverage its virtualization business, which in turn can be expected to drive the road map for Spring. We think we'll see Spring morph from a general-purpose framework to a toolkit for organizations willing to embrace the entire VMWare software stack. In our opinion, such vertical integration creates technology lock-in risks and is likely to render Spring increasingly irrelevant for those who need the freedom to choose the most appropriate deployment platform based on customer and application requirements.

[adam.fitzgerald]

I believe your concerns about the morphing of Spring are mis-placed. Both Rod Johnson and Steve Herrod (VMware CTO) clearly state in their blogs the intent to keep Spring project solutions open and accessible. Rod's blog states:

Working together with VMware we plan on creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds. ... A solution built around open, portable middleware technologies that can run on traditional Java EE application servers in a conventional data center and on Amazon EC2 and other elastic compute environments as well as on the VMware platform.

And Steve Herrod's blog states:

Let me be absolutely clear on this… our commitment to openness will continue and even grow. And In particular, the Spring framework will continue to be as open and portable as ever. We’ll continue to target it at non-SpringSource middleware and management tools, and we will also continue to enable and support deployment on non-VMware virtualization offerings and even (gasp!) physical hardware. Rod Johnson himself will make the decisions as to where Spring goes and how it remains as open as it is today.

[papphammar]

Yes, it sounds good. If it wasn't for the fact that the nature of the deal casts doubt over openness and community support, there would be no need for Spring officials to emphasize this point over and over again. They obviously recognize that our concerns are well-founded and go out of their way to put them to rest.

We shall see. Meanwhile we'll be looking for alternatives.

[karldmoore]

Yes, it sounds good. If it wasn't for the fact that the nature of the deal casts doubt over openness and community support, there would be no need for Spring officials to emphasize this point over and over again. They obviously recognize that our concerns are well-founded and go out of their way to put them to rest.

I think there's always going to be doubt over any deal, you could have said the same thing when SpringSource got VC funding a couple of years ago. SpringSource sells support contracts, but there's still plenty of people asking and answering questions on the forums..... what does that tell you about the community around Spring. IMHO it's pretty integral to the success of Spring, so it doesn't really make sense to damage it. You only have to go back to the maintenance policy changes that came up last year, the community reaction that was felt and the fact that the maintenance policy changed to take this reaction onboard.

We shall see. Meanwhile we'll be looking for alternatives.

Indeed we shall, interesting times. As for alternatives, I think it generally makes sense to know about alternatives when selecting any technology. I've spent quite a lot of time looking at Guice in the past to see what it can do for me.

[otho]

After the dotcom bubble of the 90ies now the cloud bubble. Sure, for some things it is beneficial, but the hype going into it will make a lot of people and companies pay dearly, when business models change yet again.

Aside from the more fancy name it has a lot in common with old fashioned mainframe datacenters. Also back then you could buy processing power, disk quotas etc. People and companies moved away from that model for very good reasons.

And they will do so again. The arguments against centralized molochs are still valid and don't go away just because now it's called a cloud and is depicted with some fluffy imagery.

Why SpringSource tries so desperately to follow some of the big names back to the computer stone age with dumb terminals fed by a "cloud" (e.g. Google "OS") is beyond me.