In this post I talked about how the Java standards are important to ensuring java has a long and fruitful life. This post references Spring as an example but was written before the fallout from the Spring licensing issues. This fallout tends to back up the argument that standards are important, although since there were no standards at the time for Spring to follow, it is not a totally valid position.
Over the years, many people have been knocked for claiming that Spring is a proprietary framework. How can it be when it is open source would often be the argument. Proprietary in its literal sense means that it has one owner or controller which is true for Spring for the most part. A less formal definition when discussing programming, Java in particular, is that it does not follow any open standards. Spring broke a lot of new ground which in many cases, meant that there were no standards or only bad standards to follow. However, a number of developers also bought into using other Spring features like the Templates to aid them in their development.
Now that Spring has penetrated developers code to a large degree, vendor lock in was in place for many companies with large spring based projects and Rod and Co turned off the free beer once everyone was hooked. Again, it’s their business, their platform, and they can do with it as they like.
However, if the Java platform had a set of good standards for defining framework functions, then nobody would seriously bother with a non-standard framework, and nobody would be able to shut off the tap because they could be replaced in an instant by an alternative implementation of the standard. Again, this reinforces the need for good standards (like EJB3.1 appears to be) and also for timely updates to the standards.

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