Tag Archive for 'apache'

License change for Spring IDE version 2.0

Published by Torsten 1 year, 5 months ago in Journal and Noteworthy. 0 Comments

Starting with the upcoming version 2.0 Spring IDE will be published under the Eclipse Public License version 1.0 instead the Apache 2.0 license.

What’s the reasoning behind switching to a more restrictive license?

Back in time the development of Spring IDE started selecting the corresponding license was a pragmatic approach: Ok, let’s adopt the one from the Spring Framework and its dependent libraries (Apache 2.0). So no worries about bundling differently licensed stuff or any sublicensing issues.

Over time we have learned that choosing the appropriate license for an Open Source project is very important, especially for commercial adoption of a project. Regarding Spring IDE’s commercial adoption our experiences are two-fold:

  • One vendor managed to add value for his commercial offering on top of an unmodified version of Spring IDE and publicly stated within a press release that Spring IDE was “blended”. Other vendors clearly stated the bundling of Spring IDE.This kind of adoption is really appreciated and supported.
  • Another vendor took a different approach of integrating Spring IDE: This vendor bundled a modified version of Spring IDE plugins (with its own plugin ID, version number and provider name “<vendor name> / Spring IDE Team”) within its own distribution and replaced every visual connection to the Spring IDE project (e.g. “Spring IDE” menu labels or documentation, no about dialog with copyright statement and link to Spring IDE’s website). While claiming to provide improvements like “performance enhancements” the vendor has not taken the opportunity to contribute anything back to the Spring IDE project.Although this behaviour is perfectly fine with the terms of the Apache 2.0 license Christian and me don’t feel comfortable with this situation, given the fact that we spent most of our spare time on this project.

Therefore, back in November last year when the development of Spring IDE version 2.0 started, we begun to consider if a license change could help solving this issue without hurting our users and other adopters. In order to keep the competitive advantage of supporting Spring 2.0, AOP and Spring Web Flow we decided to not publish the source code of these enhancements.

Today we finalized the migration to the Eclipse Public License v1.0 (#550) and enabled the public access to Spring IDE’s full source code again.