very strange policy, but it looks like they are some how backing from open source  strategy!
the usual next step by such a companies is developing some parts and extra components with a commercial license, around their successful open source core.

I don't see anything wrong with what they do at this point. They are not turning their backs on open source  users but they are cutting back on the number of the maintenance releases for possibly two reasons: cutting on expenses, making it more appealing for enterprises to buy a maintenance subscription. It won't change  our life since we can always go and get a fix if we can't wait for it in the next major release. I bet there will also be some other websites that will publish the packaged maintenance releases (with some google ad to adjust the money part). We're all set, nothing to worry here.

My conclusions after reading the TSS thread carefully:

So basically for example when spring  3.0 comes out, you'll get all 3.0.1, 3.0.2, etc releases after that like before, for 3 months. Then you yourself, or some nice volunteer on the web must build  the jar  files from the source. Or in other words, for users of Maven you'll always find latest and greatest jars in the public repo even if it's not build and uploaded by spring guys but by a volunteer.

And, if you report a bug against an older version don't expect it to get fixed, because old releases are maintained for paying customers only. They are trying to cut costs by just supporting latest version for normal users.

I personally don't have much of a problem with this arrangement. Most people stick with ancient major releases anyway!! I try to keep up with the latest version though. But if you lag behind and use older versions and find a bug then you're in a little trouble depending on the situation: if the bug is fixed already in a later version than yours then you should build a snapshot of their svn with the fix in it, or it's not fixed and you report it and it gets a very low priority. Moral of the story: hereafter don't lag behind anymore

I think expecting to have knowledge of running an ant or maven build  script from team of a java developer is not a big expectation.
most of the teams have at least some one who can manage to build the sources any way.

but the important question here is if they are going to stop here, or they are just backing from open source  strategy and shifting to other methods of making money.

I think they will continue to offer spring  framework open source and free. and make money on added value components.
for example currently Jasper soft is offering the jasper reports engine for free, but jasper intelligence and other higher level products are commercial.
I guess they are going to develop some commercial products on spring.

The leader of one of the open source  J2EE portals once said: We need to eat!
I guess that SpringSource and other "Open Source" companies must have plans
to make money of their products. But I think that this is not a good solution to say
that: "Wait or Pay!", the right way is: "Pay and get More!"

I think the idea behind open source  projects such as spring,hibernate and so forth is to sharing hands for developing common components in public and use them in commercial products because this way they can cut cost and lower their product prices.
(I know that there are other open source business models but I talk about common concerned components here)

I remember the ages that j2ee first came to the market. You have to write your own framework and many libraries and components that took years to finish a project.

I think SpringSource new strategy does not affect our works in the past and future as we should be wise enough to use the most stable version for our production deployments. I think building from source is not a hard task but may make us to know more about its source in some cases.