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