sounder Digest, Vol 81, Issue 56

[Samuel Thurston]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 6:07 PM, Avi <lists at avi.co> wrote:
> Samuel Thurston wrote:
>> But I have always considered "LTS" to be kind of a joke anyway.  I
>> mean, if you have no support contract, what obligation does
>> Ubuntu/Canonical have to support you, long term or otherwise?
>> Contractually, the answer is zero, regardless of which release cycle
>> you use.
>>
>
> It's not that sort of support; It's providing patches & fixing bugs,
> not helping configure software.
>
> There's quite possibly some sort of a contract implied in there through
> their having previously advertised three years of patching that'd stop
> them just aborting mid-way through, but I imagine that'd be largely
> dependent upon where you are, and IANAL anywhere.

I'm not trying to muddle the idea of an installation/support contract
and LTS-style application support.  What I am saying is that it's
become clear over the years  that LTS doesn't guarantee that things
that work at the outset won't be broken in the future, nor that all
security and bugfixes make it back upstream, and that Canonical
doesn't actually have an obligation to ensure that this is the case.
Therefore the "LTS" label is kind of meaningless with the exception
that you'll get *some* security and bugfixes for so many years.