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?
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.
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
Spring is so widely used that there are multiple "large enough" companies who could do this
- 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)
The second highest risk is using USA based cloud with 66/100.
The first one was using Spring Boot everywhere 77/100. Till the end of 2025 we need to have migration path to something else with 2 PoCs done.