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Comment by jchmbrln | Hacker News Reader

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jchmbrln·

I’m completely out of the loop. What’s going on with Spring Boot?

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The VMware apocalypse.

One does not need VMware for SpringBoot so?

Spring’s corporate steward is VMWare, and Broadcom bought VMWare, ergo Spring is subject to Broadcom’s whims.

VMware owns Spring Boot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Boot

Not spring boot, but spring, is owned by VMware. Sure spring is under a free license but if upstream enshittifies, community forks would be required.

And as popular and widely used as Spring is, that would 100% happen. To me at least, I wouldn't count this as a particularly huge risk. But in an enterprise setting, with mandatory auditing and stuff, I can understand why there would be a requirement to at least pre-identify alternative(s).

> Not spring boot, but spring, is owned by VMware

How do I reconcile this statement with VMWare holding the copyright which you will find unambiguously littered in the official Spring Boot repository?

Since you contend the contrary, who does in fact hold the copyright?

Probably a bit of overreaction given that Broadcom is now in charge of Spring. At the end of the day it’s a wildly popular open source project — it has a path forward if Broadcom pulls shenanigans.

That said, I have noticed that the free support window for any given version is super short these days. I.e. if you’re not on top of constantly upgrading you’re looking at paid support if you want security patches.

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