On the evening of April 30th, Springsource released their first
public beta of the SpringSource Application Platform – or S2AP in
short. Springsource and the Spring community celebrates this as the
next quantum leap in Java-based application development.

So, what is so new and great about this: S2AP combines the power of Spring with the standards of OSGi.

If you got interested and want to learn more about it, go here. You can also register and participate in the public beta program here.

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If you want to learn more about OSGi, you may want to check out the site of the OSGi Alliance, the Apache Felix project – an open source OSGi container, or Knopflerfish OSGi, another open source implementation of OSGi R3 and R4.

S2AP will be released under a dual licensing model: a commercial “Enterprise” version and an open source community edition.

The
OSS license will be GPL3 which allows everyone to use it as long as the
end product or any extension to S2AP will be released back to the
community under GPL3.

What does this actually mean? It prevents any commercial product planning to use S2AP from
being closed source. Or, in other words, nobody will be able to
use S2AP in any proprietary or closed-source project or product unless the user of S2AP is willing to
release the resulting work as GPL3 as well or is subscribing to the
“Enterprise” license.

Here is a quote from Rod Johnson on TheServerside: “GPL would
prevent a commercial vendor building a closed product around the
SpringSource Application Platform without giving back to the community“.

This is Springsource’s first significant move to secure its future with a potentially steady revenue source.