Whats all the fuss about spring source charging big money?
I know, i know, most bloggers usually make very bad fact checkers, but this is just absurd. The bruhaha around SpringSource's decision to charge money for their binary (only binary) releases, finally got so big that I decided to call up a sales rep. Reports of astronomical sums, one blogger mentioned 22.000 US$, totally scared me and I wanted to know if that was true.
And sure enough: It's not.
The salesperson was nice enough to let me know, that for the whole spring software stack and 10 incidents plus some development software, I would have to shell out 630€ - about 900 US$ per year and per CPU. Affected are only production systems, not developer machines. For all she cared I would've been able to supply every developer in India with a fresh release, as long as he works for me and doesn't violate the EULA. Also, cores do not count as additional CPUs.
I don't know what kind of support Ryan was talking about when he was offered the 22k$ package, but I suppose he wanted Rod Johnson to hold his hand while coding, singing him a lullaby and basically giving him the teet - for that, 22k$ seem pretty reasonable to me 
Still, getting a community hooked on an open source product and then charging them for their dependence on said product - after all learning spring is a big investment - smells kinda funny to me. I will have to decide carefully if I really need Spring 3 and all those tools after all.
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