I’m still trying to catch up on all the open source-related news I missed during my recent absence.

One company that was busier than most in that period was SpringSource, which announced a new maintenance policy, senior executive appointment, partnerships, product releases and growth indicators.

The executive appointment saw Rob Bearden joining the team as president and COO.

The former COO of JBoss is a great hire for SpringSource. He most recently served as entrepreneur in residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital which invested $10m in the company in May 2007 and joined Accel in investing a further $15m in June this year.

On the product side the company also announced the GA release of dm Server, the OSGi-based Java server that forms the foundation of the SpringSource Application Platform, which we first wrote about back in May.

SpringSource dm Server running on Amazon EC2 and S3 is also used to support SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository, the newly-announced repository of 400 OSGi-ready enterprise open source Java libraries.

In a product-related announcement the company also detailed its Enterprise Maintenance Policy for Spring. The policy is an effort to provide more value for SpringSource Enterprise subscribers by committing to “maintenance releases for three years from the general availability of a major new version.”

The policy should also help to drive more Spring users to become SpringSource customers, given that “After a new major version of Spring is released, community maintenance updates will be issued for three months to address initial stability issues. Subsequent maintenance releases will be available to SpringSource Enterprise customers.”

Converting users to paying customers is a challenge for any open source vendor but there is clearly an opportunity for SpringSource as it announced that cumulative downloads for Spring have surpassed the three million milestone on SourceForge, and that Spring has been downloaded an estimated five million times.

The company believes that there are 31,000 organizations using Spring, giving it plenty of opportunity for up-sell. It also recently noted that it “counts recurring revenue from more than 450 enterprise customers on a global basis” and had “grown 250 percent year-over-year in quarterly bookings and has more than doubled revenues for the third consecutive year”.

In the midst of all that the company also announced partnerships with Satyam and Pentaho, as well as the election of CEO Rod Johnson to the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee.

With the clocks set to fall back in the US this weekend it looks like the SpringSource team could use that extra hour of sleep.