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

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.

What was the actual risk of using SpringBoot tho?

License changes - BSL or closing the source

If there's no money in it for them - reduction of staff or funding leading to slower releases and bugfixes

Moving some features like Spring Cloud / Spring Integration, or new development behind a paywall (think RHEL)

Big users (like Netflix, Walmart, JPMorgan, LinkedIn/Microsoft, etc) would likely be able to pay for it (until they moved off), but smaller companies and individual developers not so much

I think it would be more of a Redis situation - steward changes the license, someone large enough to maintain a fork creates one, and everyone moves to the fork. In Redis's case, Amazon forked it into Valkey.

Spring is so widely used that there are multiple "large enough" companies who could do this

What's the actual risk though? Just saying it's the riskiest at 77/100 doesn't mean anything.

Among others:

- license change -> restricting features behind a paid tier (https://spring.io/blog/2025/04/21/spring-cloud-data-flow-com...)

- reducing headcount of people -> slow security patching + not following industry standards

- all eggs in one basket :)

- cut from major clouds (Azure Spring apps)