>>> I think 10 years would be best. Any less than 5 is asking for trouble. Sure >>> Sage >>> makes a new release every couple of weeks, but as we see from recent >>> discussions, not everyone wants to update every couple of weeks.
I think both are unrealistic for a volunteer project. Instead of looking at what Sun or Wolfram offer, look at what the large FOSS projects offer. Mozilla Firefox is supported for about 6 months after the following major release. For FreeBSD, the last version released on each major branch is supported for 2 years after release (earlier versions are supported for between 1 and 2 years) and deprecated functionality will normally be retained for a complete major release after the deprecation announcement. On 2009-Nov-02 12:40:39 +0000, "Dr. David Kirkby" <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: >If Wikipedia is to be believed: > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%28operating_system%29 > >then Sun are supporting SunOs 5.8 (Solaris 8) until 2012, which is 12-years >after it was released. Solaris 9 is supported until 2014, which is also 12 >years >since it was released. http://www.sun.com/service/eosl/eosl_solaris.html provides a better description of what Sun offer. They actually only offer bug-fixes and enhancements for 2 years after the "last ship date" for an version of Solaris. Beyond that, the "support" just means they have access to pre-existing patches. >I would add Solaris is also free. The initial operating system is. The support is definitely not free: In order to access email/phone support or patches, you must have a paid support contract. >I know some of you linux guys probably find Solaris a pain, but it looks like >Oracle is going to be buying Sun for 7 billion USD. For a company to be valued >at $7,000,000,000 they must have done something right! Oracle's CEO is also stating that Sun is losing massive amounts of money - which suggests they aren't doing everything right. The valuation is also what Oracle is willing to pay to prevent one of its competitors gaining control of Oracle's most popular hardware platform. -- Peter Jeremy
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