Security Support for Debian 3.1 to be terminated

Less than three years from what though? Windows XP is still supported after five years or
so... but only if you upgraded to Service Pack 2. Your Debian system is still supported too...
if you're willing to upgrade it to version 4.0

In both cases this "required" upgrade isn't too difficult but it might sabotage compatibility
with 3rd party software, require configuration changes to get things working smoothly again
and you may need some re-training. Applying "Service Pack 2" /sounds/ less drastic than the
upgrade from Debian 3.1 to 4.0 but that's about it.

Microsoft and Red Hat are both in the situation that they'd quite like customers to run the
stuff that's near the cutting edge, but they don't want to lose customers who can't or won't
do that. Every old version supported costs money, which they'd prefer to spend on R&D for the
new versions. Both of them have shifted to a model where customers (big corporate ones at
least) can run whatever version of the OS they like for the same annual fee, with a rolling
cycle of upgrades.

For a community maintained operating system you have to make a decision about where the
community's priorities lie and follow that. Debian and Fedora have taken radically different
decisions here, but I think both are successful at what they do.