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.

  • nottelling@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.orgOPEnglish
      22·
      1 year ago

      According to Debian Releases

      Debian announces its new stable release on a regular basis. Users can expect 3 years of full support for each release and 2 years of extra LTS support.

      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:

      Companies using Debian who benefit from this project are encouraged to either help directly or contribute financially. The number of properly supported packages depends directly on the level of support that the LTS team receives.

      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.

    • neuromancer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      Yes, fixes for CVE’s are back ported.

      E.g. Debian 8 was released in 2015 and all support will be terminated in 2025 when there is no more Freexian support.

      Currently, the release cycle is 2 years standard release 1 year support by the Debian security team, 2 years LTS support, and 5 years ELTS with Freexain, you get a total of 10 years support.

      The problem is always going to be that after the first 3 years the support is not handle by Debian, and it doesn’t include all architectures of the original release, if you are using exotic hardware don’t expect to get the full 10 years you get with x86.

    • Auli@lemmy.ca
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yes but the real issue is the downstream have had it pretty easy and now have to do more work.