Discontinued SUSE Linux Distribution: 9.0

[cheetahman]

Dear suse-security-announce subscribers and SUSE LINUX users,

SUSE Security announces that SUSE Linux 9.0 (Personal and Professional
edition) will be discontinued soon. Having provided security-relevant
fixes for more than two years, vulnerabilities found in SUSE Linux 9.0
after December 15 2005 will not be fixed any more for this product.

As a consequence, the SUSE Linux 9.0 distribution directory on our ftp
server ftp.suse.com has been moved from /pub/suse/i386/9.0/ to the
/pub/suse/discontinued/ directory tree structure to free space on our
mirror sites. The 9.0 directory in the update tree
/pub/suse/i386/update/9.0 will follow, as soon as all updates have been
published.

The discontinuation of SUSE Linux 9.0 enables us to focus on the SUSE
LINUX distributions of a newer release dates to ensure that our customers
can continuously take advantage of the quality that they are used to with
SUSE LINUX products.

This announcement holds true for SUSE Linux 9.0 only. As usual, SUSE will
continue to provide update packages for the following products:

SUSE LINUX 9.1
SUSE LINUX 9.2
SUSE LINUX 9.3
and
SUSE Linux 10.0

for a two-year period after the release of the respective distribution.

Please note that the maintenance cycles of SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server
products and products based on the SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server operating
system are not affected by this announcement. To learn more about SUSE
LINUX business products, please visit http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/.
If you have any questions regarding this announcement, please do not
hesitate to contact SUSE Security at <security@suse.de>.

[chopin1810]

This sucks, they're turning into Microsoft, with their stupid support cycles and such...

[bryansmith]

To be fair, you can not expect them to maintain and provide services for a distribution for much longer than this. I would rather they focus on providing quality updates and patches for the more recent releases.

Bryan

[chopin1810]

They don't really have to do it formally though... like with Windows, 98 SE was awesome quite frankly, but it's worthless now because they're gonna end support for it in 2006 or something... so I wasted 200 bucks when I bought it then, and I was perfectly fine with it too, but I had to buy xp 'cause 98 se wasn't gonna have any updates in a couple of years...

[Vergil83]

There is the perfect example of a FOSS strength. It makes no sense to provide secruity updates forever. However, unlike with MS you have the right to pay someone to continue to provide security support if you don't want to yourself.

[cheetahman]

But Since its linux people can still make programs for it and secturity patches