The last ten years has been an exciting and challenging journey for me and I’m very proud of the technology and community that my SpringSource cofounders and I fostered. However, there always comes a time to make a choice about the places you’ll go, and it’s time for me to leave VMware and pursue other interests. I wish VMware and my colleagues continued success, and know that Spring will continue to thrive.

http://blog.springsource.org/2012/07/03/oh-the-places-youll-go/

Ya know... when I first saw a news post with a title like "Rod Johnson leaving SpringSource; what will the direction be now?" I had to think, "Really?  The departure of a single person (no matter who) affects a product that much?  And people are making decisions to weave this product into their enterprise products?"

Who do we know (or care about) who've left Oracle or Microsoft or even Sun (back in the day)? Even Gosling stopped messing with Java long ago (in a serious way that affected product direction) and nobody really cared.

Rod is just a factory bean of the RodJohnsonTemplate class.  I'm sure VMWare has new injetions in the wings that they can load (annotatons or XML).  Hope VMWare has all the old unit tests to run against the bean too.

Thanks Rod!   

Congrats to Rod on a great job building a platform and a business. A job well done.