Hi Jan

Thanks for the reply... but did you read my post? I'm _not_ saying that 
Magnolia should support the old versions to the day we die. :-) 
However I said that it makes absolutely no sense to deny access to the already 
available releases for the CE customers. You simply cannot argue with 
"minimizing the maintenance effort" because it creates no additional 
effort/cost!

I'm always telling our CE customers "you get what you pay for" so even if we 
trip over a nasty bug I would be the first in line to tell them: "Sorry, 
Magnolia 4.4 it EOL. Magnolia will not release any more versions or create any 
more bug fixes for it." (And I actually did this for 4.4. Most of them agreed 
to pay the hefty fee it takes to move a website from 4.4 to 4.5 because I told 
them that things would be better on 4.5.) But telling them every year the same 
story even tough Magnolia actually _did_ release new versions of their software 
puts us integrators/consultants in a "difficult" position to use very soft 
word. And this directly fires back at Magnolia itself.

So far we could fully represent Magnolia, telling our customer why it is a safe 
investment and such. But no-one can do this without blushing with the way you 
handle your "maintenance policy". Now, if I'm honest, I need to tell our 
customers: Well, we can go with Magnolia, but you need to know that we most 
likely will have to upgrade every year. And oh, yes, the upgrade process for 
the last two releases has been very bumpy and will cost you about half of what 
you paid for the development of the website". And Jan, you _know_ that this is 
the truth with real life projects.

So again, this is bad for Magnolia and it really kills us. That's why I said in 
my post: No matter how I look at it, it just does not make sense.

I don't want free lunches from Magnolia, but the integrators need a maintenance 
policy that makes sense and that we can support and defend. And if Magnolia 
want's to benefit from the big, lively community (wide user base, lot's of 
feedback, many integrators, lots of 3rd party modules), then it should try to 
keep that community alive.

-will

-- 
Context is everything: 
http://forum.magnolia-cms.com/forum/thread.html?threadId=b0816b60-f2a1-4140-94ba-600420b9276f


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