Mandrake Linux End of life product policy

This email outlines and clarifies the product lifetime for the Mandrake
Linux operating system, and gives the end of life dates of our products.

With the forthcoming release of Mandrake Linux 9.1, we are forced to
consider the product lifetime of existing products.  Because every update
released by MandrakeSoft involves extensive testing and QA, we feel that 
we are better able to provide support for, and deliver timely support of, 
our products by discontinuing support for "legacy" distributions.

The product life of Mandrake Linux products has not been publicly
disclosed, and as a result customers may have been forced into quick
migrations to newer products to continue receiving security and bug fix
updates.  We believe that customers should be able to plan migrations to 
newer distributions well in advance of their discontinuation date.

With the release of Mandrake Linux 9.1, we will put in place a cycle that
customers can easily anticipate.  MandrakeSoft will provide 12 months of
"desktop" support for distributions, and 18 months of "base" support for
distributions.  This means that applications such as window managers,
desktop environments, browsers, etc. will have a 12 month support life,
while applications such as the kernel, Apache, and other "base" components
will have a support life of 18 months.  At certain times, MandrakeSoft may
choose to extend support for certain versions of Mandrake Linux.

Finally, specialized "server" products, will have a full life support of 
no less than 24 months.

The following is a schedule of when support will be dropped for products
that are currently supported:

  Product			Desktop Updates		Base Updates
  --------------------  	----------------------  ------------------
  Mandrake Linux 7.2		immediately		March 31, 2003
  Mandrake Linux 8.0		immediately		March 31, 2003
  Mandrake Linux 8.1		March 31, 2003		March 31, 2003
  Single Network Firewall 7.2	n/a			June 1, 2003
  Mandrake Linux 8.2		March 31, 2003		September 31, 2003
  Mandrake Linux 9.0		September 31, 2003	March 31, 2004
  Multi Network Firewall 8.2	n/a			December 12, 2004

All users of these products should plan to upgrade before the noted
termination of support dates in order to continue receiving updates.

-- 
MandrakeSoft Security; http://www.mandrakesecure.net/
"lynx -source http://linsec.ca/vdanen.asc | gpg --import"
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