The Register: Red Hat Intros 12 Month Only Support on ‘Consumer’ OSes

“Linux release cycles are of course pretty fast, and Linux is
either free or cheap, depending on whether or not you feel the need
to add to your manual pile. However, if Linux is being used in a
commercial environment then IT managers are not going to be
particularly enthusiastic about even the possibility of having to
upgrade to a new version every 12 months. Red Hat’s current death
list EOLs RH 7.1-8.0 at the end of this year, while 6.2 and 7.0 get
theirs as of the end of March.

“The Register can supply a real life example of how and why this
could be a problem. Until a couple of weeks ago our site was
running on Red Hat 6.2, installed around 15 months ago because,
even though 7.x was then current, 6.2 was the maximum the techies
at the host company were geared up to support. No doubt they moved
up to 7.x at some point during the intervening period, but we stuck
with what was working until we had reason to set up new hardware,
and would have stuck longer if we hadn’t had that reason. (We
switched to Debian, since you ask. And because the techies are in
love with it, since you ask that too…)”

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