Comment by en4bz
7 years ago
Totally agree. RHEL's support windows are FAR too long and result in more problems than they solve. Large businesses wait till the last minute to upgrade then realize that working through a minimum of 5 years (often 10) of changes is extremely hard. This means that you often run unsupported while everyone scrambles to fix all the changes introduced by the upgrade. Cannonical's 5 year support window is much more sensible.
For individuals and small businesses, sure it makes no sense. But large enterprise customers will pay a lot of money for support windows that are far too long. That's why Red Hat (and every other large company) offers them. Even when the publicly available support ends, they still often have hangers-on who will pay even more money to get a few more years support out of them.