On the future of free long term support for Linux distributions
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The reality is that reliable backports of security fixes is expensive (partly because backports are hard in general). The older a distribution version is, generally the more work is required. To generalize somewhat, this work does not get done for free; someone has to pay for it.
People using Linux distributions have for years been in the fortunate position that companies with money were willing to fund a lot of painstaking work and then make the result available for free. One of the artifacts of this was free distributions with long support periods. My view is that this supply of corporate money is in the process of drying up, and with it will go that free long term support. This won't be a pleasant process.
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I could be wrong, but isn't the entire debian stable tree maintained for years via open source contributions? Sure the redhat downstreams might be on their own, but there's plenty of non-commercial distros that keep up to date.
According to Debian Releases
So about 5 years, though it is not clear how well this works in practice (how much is actually updated and how well supported).
From the Debian Wiki - LTS:
I think this is sort of what the article is pointing towards... long-term support really depends on commercial support, as volunteers are more likely to work on the current or more recent thing than go back and backport or update older things. If corporate funding dries up (which it appears to be doing), then while volunteers will still contribute some to long-term linux distributions, it won't be at the same level it currently is with commercial support.
Yes but the real issue is the downstream have had it pretty easy and now have to do more work.