Hi, Sythos wrote:
On Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:13:33 +0200 werner@aloah-from-hell.de wrote: The major benefit of opensource software is the "darwin effect", good software evolve quickly, bad software die, force a maintainer to work on a software for 2 years more than usual may mean force a unusefull work, *imho* 3 years are already too much for a lot of enviroments (like development)
There are many whom won't spend a cent on something that is working, such as a small business with one internal server which doesn't host any external services (restricted ssh for support maybe, but that's all).
Those are the kinds of businesses that will run XP as a server until the machine dies and not even bother with security updates. Some people shouldn't own computers ;-)
And insofar as LTS is concerned, well -- what happens if you install a new server at year 3 or year 4, you're already well behind the 5 year cycle.
I would like to see all major release having support for 5 years. And yes, I do see the problems with that too. But the long term support can concentrate on bug fixes only (security and product functionality).
Don't get me wrong, but one of things I don't like about Debian is that there are possible unsupported packages from an earlier release that stay there with a rolling update. Those packages may be useful, it is a pity that they can't continue to be supported, but getting a package sponsor is the problem. Install a new system and you can't easily have that older package. Anyway, all this gets complicated.
The greatest goal in my opinion, should be to support the security and "stableness" of every major release as long as possible, within reason. And I don't think that 30 months to 3 years is long enough; and this is certainly re-enforced by those seeking an LTS version.
-- Kind Regards AndrewM Andrew McGlashan Broadband Solutions now including VoIP