Greg Smith wrote:
If some big-iron shop who is so blind to security issues that they want to keep 7.4 on life support, they certainly can find someone to deliver such a support agreement on a contract basis. But they shouldn't expect the public project to keep them afloat for free, and saying this project "must be ready" to handle them is quite debatable. Given the limited resources of the public volunteers here, supporting ancient versions is a drain it's hard to justify outside the context of such a support agreement. Using your own examples, Oracle and Sun sure don't, why should PostgreSQL?
I am not arguing that Postgres, Oracle, Sun or anyone else should have to support such obsolete products, or that they are the only source for that support. I only state the fact that many organizations are slow to move off even obsolete products - this is something I have observed more than once in more than one contract. I only claimed in my post that "we must be ready to deal with that", since it is a fact, not that vendors should have to support those products for free.
For example, in my work I deal with that by strongly urging my clients not to use obsolete software, after explaining that the software in question is actually obsolete. They don't always agree with my recommendation, then I deal with that in turn. It's not like they make me their decision maker.
I agree that no one should have to support obsolete products for free, and that these organizations should upgrade.
-- Lew ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
