I *knew* you'd ask that :). Spring supports @Inject since the 3.x versions, that's true. If a user wanted to use it, she has to add the approprate dependencies to get the annotation on the classpath. @Autowired is already there. From a functional point of view, both annotations have just the same impact.

Perhaps we should then add an explicit component model "jsr330" that uses @Inject and @Singleton.