Why end-of-life LTS releases in April?

[Jordan Erickson]

If you think about it, it's not like it's going to stop working in
April...you have a couple months to prep the upgrade before Summer hits.


Ubuntu LTS serves *much* more than Education, btw ;)


Cheers,
Jordan



john wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I was sort of idly wondering why does Ubuntu end-of-life their LTS
> releases in April? Whose interest does it serve?
> From my prospective (e.g. a school computer admin) it's a terrible
> time. It leaves me with unsupported software for 3 months of the
> school year.
> Assuming (perhaps erroneously) that many of the most avid users of LTS
> Desktop releases are educational institutions (after all individual
> users probably track the "latest and greatest" ubuntu), why not just
> push the EOL date back until July? Granted that may not work for parts
> of the world where school happens in July, but it would at least work
> for approx .5 of the worlds edubuntu user base. Or perhaps it should
> EOL on a schedule that works for the other .5. I am not really arguing
> for one or the other (if indeed this is really a concern, I see that
> Australian schools seem to have a holiday from July 5 to July 21). I
> am merely suggesting that the current schedule doesn't work very well
> for ANY educational institution.
> 
> As I understand it Hardy will EOL in April 2011, so if a change were
> to be implemented, there would be some time to adjust. Note I am only
> talking about Desktop LTS  EOL cycle's. It wouldn't even require
> (much) more developer energy since most fixes likely to come in the
> additional three months of support would probably be mirrored in the
> Server LTS support which runs an additional 2 years (e.g. Hardy Server
> LTS EOL is April 2013). Perhaps that's already how it works and I am
> just full of beans (I don't think this is the case since Edu 7.04 LTS
> didn't get updates after April 2008).
> 
> I'd be interested in someone setting me straight if I am way of base here.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> John
>