Red Hat intros 12 month only support on 'consumer' OSes (Register)

Posted Jan 28, 2003 9:55 UTC (Tue) by beejaybee (guest, #1581)
Parent article: Red Hat intros 12 month only support on 'consumer' OSes (Register)

This is NOT the end of the world ... RH6.2 users can still upgrade from source when security issues need to be addressed.

Naturally RH have the right to apply their support resources in a way which benefits their, and their stockholders', interests. However...

1) The fact that RH seems to be ending support for hardware platforms other than IA32 appears to be being ignored.

2) Just think of the outroar if M$ tried to force upgrades in this way. Well, they DID (though not quite as agressively as RH), there WAS an uproar, and there was a considerable amount of fudging around when the new policy was to come into force.

Personally I think there should be a two-stage cutoff:

(a) support for enhancements & cosmetic fixes to be short - say until the next minor release but one;

(b) support for critical security issues (those which could result in the system being rooted, or abused in a major way by an intruder) should be guaranteed for a reasonable time - I'd suggest 3 to 5 years.

Red Hat intros 12 month only support on 'consumer' OSes (Register)

Posted Jan 28, 2003 15:58 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

The sad point is that ending support for Alpha and Sparc comes down to simple market economics. They were money losers and unlike Microsoft, Red Hat can't charge such a large premium on their main product to pay for money losers.

THe ratio of sales were something like the following: 1 Sparc for every 10 Alpha boxes sold, 1 Alpha box sold for every 100-500 Intel boxes sold. However, the feature requests and bug reports were sometimes in the opposite ratios. And the worst part was that the number of people in the community who could fix those problems were much much much smaller than in the Intel community.

On the other two points, I think that if people are willing to pay for that long of a support then a company would deliver it. Most people want the support for ever, and dont want to pay for it.