Eclipse STS License

[Ron Wheeler <rw...@artifact-software.com>]

I am not a lawyer nor do I  have any connection to Springsource but 
there have been some questions raised about the license for Eclipse STS 
IDE so I did a bit of reading.
Eclipse/STS is a free and very complete out-of-the-box solution for 
developers who want to use Maven and do not want to spend a day or two 
reconfiguring Eclipse to get all of the plug-ins that you need to have a 
smooth Maven environment, everytime you want to upgrade Eclipse.

 From their forum by the senior project manager:
"We got some questions about what "free" in the context of STS actually 
means. So let me try to explain: Firstly starting with version 
2.0.2.RELEASE, STS is available at no cost and free for all development 
purposes; no strings attached."
and his follow-up comment
"The license allows you to use STS in a "non-production" environment. In 
the context of STS the term "non-production" is a bit pointless as I've 
never seen anybody running an IDE in their production system; as its 
sole purpose is to support the developer during development."

The post from April 14,2010 can be read in full at:
Go Back 
<http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?t=87793&highlight=license#> 
	Spring Community Forums <http://forum.springsource.org/index.php> > 
Spring Projects <http://forum.springsource.org/forumdisplay.php?f=21> > 
SpringSource Tool Suite 
<http://forum.springsource.org/forumdisplay.php?f=32>
Reload this Page 
<http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?t=87793&highlight=license> 
*STS License has changed?? *


I hope that this clarifies the  situation.
You can run your software in a production environment and you can use 
STS to develop that software.

The Springsource guys have some very nice commercial tools for 
supporting production environments but I am not using any of these yet, 
so I do not have any recommendations on that side.

We do use Eclipse/STS for all development of our production systems and 
our products for resale.
We started with pure Eclipse for the first 18 months and then found 
Eclipse/STS.
Eclipse/STS and Nexus (found it a bit later) has improved our 
understanding of Maven a lot and has made the development process a lot 
more productive.
We also use Subversion, Spring and Hibernate which are well supported by 
Eclipse/STS.
We do not use Hudson so I have no idea if there are tools in STS to 
assist in managing that environment.
We are starting to move into the Cloud and I suspect that we may start 
to use some of the Springsource commercial products to manage deployment 
and operations if we start to have a lot of cloud servers in production.

I hope that this helps make Maven a bit easier for others.

Ron