SUSE, Red Hat, Canonical Lengthen Open Source OS Support Cycle

How long will vendors support open source operating systems? Longer than ever, if moves like SUSE‘s extension of the life span for its enterprise Linux distribution and Canonical‘s rethinking of the Ubuntu release cycle are any clue. And for the open source ecosystem, those are big changes.

After all, a lot of open source software—even some of the platforms at the core of ISV solutions, such as the KVM virtualization hypervisor, Hadoop and OpenStack—are governed by the GPL, Apache or other licenses that explicitly deny any warranty from software developers. That doesn’t mean vendors can’t supply warranties and other support in value-added form, of course, as thousands do. But it does say something about the state of support expectations within the open source ecosystem that so much open source code, including in production environments, comes with no warranty whatsoever.

Now, however, better and longer software support seems to be the trend from open source vendors. Last week, SUSE announced that it would support SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for 13 years, up from the previous cycle of 10. That helps SUSE stand out from Red Hat (RHT), one of its major competitors in the open source space, which supports current Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) releases for 10 years (which is an enhancement, by the way, from earlier versions of RHEL, which Red Hat supported only for seven years).

Canonical has pursued a similar trend for Ubuntu Linux. “Long term support” (LTS) editions of the operating system currently receive support for five years on both the desktop and server. That’s significantly shorter than Red Hat and SUSE’s offerings, but it reflects an expansion from earlier policies, under which Canonical supported desktop releases for a maximum of three years. And the company’s present experiment with “rolling releases” introduces a new dynamic altogether, offering users the option of an operating system that will never reach the end of its support cycle—albeit one that also receives rapid updates, which may not always be appropriate for production environments.

The march toward ever-longer support cycles reflects, in part, the strength and confidence of the major vendors in the enterprise Linux market. It’s also likely a sign that these companies expect customers and channel partners to demand fewer version upgrades, and to prefer to stick with existing products for longer (which is something Canonical might want to take into account, since the rate at which it currently pushes out new LTS releases may be faster than what the channel wants). And it makes the necessity of constantly upgrading open source software a thing of the past—unless, of course, you want all the cool, new features.