I can be fair and say that EOL does not happen in the free software world.
I consider that upgrade to be support and both Red Hat and Debian have done very well. I've moved machines from potato to woody and then to sarge without problems. I've also moved from Red Hat 5 to 6 and then to 7. Especially impressive was taking data from Red Hat 7 to Woody without all that much fuss. I can't say, because I did not do the transitions, but I imagine that Red Hat 7 to 8 to 9 and then to Fedora was not all that bad. I consider all of it much easier than it was to move from DOS to Windows 3.1 to 95 to 98 which all required complete wipes if not new computers. Patching and binary swap outs are nice and work much better in the free world. Free source code never really dies and it's much more modular than binary stuff in the commercial world. I can run the same software on newer distributions that found favor in older ones. If I wanted, I could have all the same software that I used for Potato or Red Hat 5. Newer software has proved better and I've moved on but I still like to run Window Maker and use some older Gnome stuff and programs like gqview. Sure, there are some growth issues. Things like ipfw have been superseeded by ipchains and iptables. It would be hard for me to use something nice like guarddog with a 2.0 kernel, but it's easy to swap out to a 2.2 kernel or even a 2.6. I'll also be fair and note that 2000 is four years old, 98 is six and only 95 is nine years old. None of the software I mentioned is older than six years because I was a late starter. Only software that has owners has an end of life because only an owner can say that a certain source file will no longer be used or maintained. On Thursday 15 July 2004 01:24 pm, Tim Fournet wrote: > To be fair, how many Linux distros are still providing updates to > versions they came out with 9 years ago? Of course, doing version > upgrades on Linux costs a lot less than they do on Windows, but the fact > remains that there comes a point in time when new patches don't fit on > old code, and it's time to upgrade. >
