Spring is ramping into the cloud I read. In my opinion VMWare produces great products and are in a huge growth market. This will pull a lot of java folks into the cloud that haven't gotten around to it yet. Still, I agree, seems like a strange acquisition.

I haven't used it much in a couple year, but I would not consider Spring lean software in the least, as stated. Standard package comes with quite a bit, but even at it's leanest IoC I'd consider Google Guice leaner (and prettier imo). Certainly better than the old EJB specs though.