I suppose you realize there is no debate here, just a misunderstanding on what they are talking about. Rod is trying to make a point about how it is important to have commit rights, but he doesn't say why. I suppose he realizes that they are forking and he wants to prevent that by politely convicing them to join the Spring project, and of course earn that right by providing the fixes they find.

Everyone else feels that they are being considered as oil and tire changers and therefore, at least emotionally (and there is always an emotional factor in any purchase decision), they are not buying Rod's idea.

Would you buy a car if the salesman says "this car is for morons". Even if it is the car you like, you are going to do business elsewhere.

Rod, please take a marketing or sales course if you want to act as a salesman (and I mean in the good sense of the word, not as a used car salesman).

I've a lot of respect (technically) for what you've done with Spring , and (commercially) on how you've grown a successful business around it.

But I have to disagree with one point; When you say that unless you are contributing software to Spring via CVS that

You are contributing nothing to driving the software forward

I think you've forgotton one point; all the people that are 'only' publicising Spring (including offering to support it) *are* helping the project by bringing new customers to the framework.

Unless you feel that Spring doesn't need any new customers

Paul

I think you should seriously reflect on the tone and content of these last two posts and reconsider your position.

I do agree that my tone was probably overly harsh. I regret that. Some googling has shown that Ben, in particular, is clearly sincere about his opinions and I respect that.

However, I also am sincere in my belief that it is important to debate business models around open source, especially in the context of longer term sustainability and generation of open source code, even if it is not a popular topic to bring up, and I hope people can also understand that these posts were the product of conviction rather than marketing strategy. Because it is inevitable that there will be businesses around open source: all of the companies involved in this discussion have their own business models and there are more and more open source businesses.

Rgds
Rod

You do yourself, your company, and your product, and your community a great disservice when you sound off on a vitriolic rant such as this one – disparaging other people who work hard and care about about contributing to the community.

It is very shortsighted and narrow minded to minimize the contributions of third party support, especially when it can be delivered consistently at a high level of quality. I can't see how this is not beneficial to the Spring project.

I think you should seriously reflect on the tone and content of these last two posts and reconsider your position.

1) SourceLabs is based on the notion of being open about the scope and quality of the support we can provide. That's how we win our business. Our first response when we encounter a customer with a support need is to suggest that they give various vendors support cases, and judge us on how we do. We encourage that, because that's the best way we can demonstrate our differentiators – expertise in all the projects customers care about, the technology and information in our Continuous Support System, and a service offering and level tailored to the most demanding enterprise customers.

Not surprisingly, customers rarely start a support case with the statement "We have a problem in Spring." That's partly because thanks to the Spring developers, it's a solid project. But it's also because most customers have not isolated the problem to that level. A more common case begins with "We're getting this exception thrown, and it appears to occur when our code is accessing this database through Spring and Hibernate and this JDBC driver." We have the technology and expertise to go from that point to a solution, and the customer doesn't have to get on the phone with four different vendors to get their problem solved.

That's not to say that that's the only way to differentiate a support business, or that that's what all customers want, but that's what we do, and demand is heavy.

2) SourceLabs invests heavily in and contributes to open source in numerous ways – as Rod notes our website highlights some of these. A number of these contributions include core engineering on projects that Spring depends on. We also provide the Swik.net community site, which has over 1 million unique visitors a month. The Spring pages helps promote Spring as a whole to those 1 million unique visitors, and clearly mentions the creators of Spring and Interface21's business – as it does for thousands of open source projects. What's more, it's a wiki, so if you don't feel it promotes your favorite project or company well enough, you can change it.

3) SourceLabs like so many companies feels that open source – the concept, the spirit, and many of the surrounding solutions – is superior to propriety software and the real competition we see now and in the future are proprietary software products. It's long been a policy of ours to wherever sensible work with open source companies, and each of our support engineers is required to spend 50% of his or her time on open source contributions of his/her choosing. I don't know about the other companies mentioned in this discussion, but our openness to business relationships and our focus on being active investors in and contributors to open source has been solid from day one.

We envision a world in which talented contributors employed by successful businesses in the open source world are all able to prosper, and we feel strongly that that is inevitable – the giant size of the proprietary software market is a very large pie.

It really looks like you're trying to control the Spring environment.

Let me quote from the post you're commenting about: "I want to make again something completely clear that I already stated in my last blog, but seems to have been misinterpreted by some: Interface21 has no desire to prevent others making money from Spring. Our track record proves that. We welcome others writing about Spring and providing Spring services. Or basing products on Spring."

You claim:

It is you that limits the groups or organizations or individuals that support Spring, and the folks that are deemed 'committers'.

Did you actually read my post? I wrote that "commit rights are earnt" not that "commit rights are linked to employment status."

The aggregators I mentioned have never tried to give back with respect to Spring (and numerous other projects). It's not that we have prevented them contributing. There are non-I21 committers on Spring. Commit rights on Spring are granted on merit, not employment status. No aggregator has provided patches, given meaningful help to users or attempted to contribute. They've had years to do so and have not. Which is what irks me. (Btw BEA, Oracle and IBM have each contributed more to Spring than any of the aggregators, despite the fact that the latter should be displaying their deep love of open source.)

Interface21 is a company founded by deep techies, and is responsible for producing a huge amount of top quality open source. It is ploughing millions of dollars annually into a huge increase in our already large investment into developing the Spring Portfolio–Apache License Software.

I've been responsible for creating or stimulating the creation of millions of lines of open source software. I agree: I should be ashamed.

Rgds
Rod