What are consequences of "merger necessitates removal of ...

[Jef Spaleta]

Mark A. Hoover:

> Sure, nobody's holding a gun to your head, but if you want to have all
> the  security updates, you *are* forced to do the major version
> upgrades.

No actually you are not...you could in fact...support yourself if you
want to invest the time and energy to watch for security updates and do
the security patch backports and recompile for your legacy systems that
you do not want to touch unnecessarily. But really what you want is the
option to have someone else do all the work for you...for as long as you
want that work done..without paying a reasonable fee for that time and
energy expenditure.

There is a cost associated with providing those security
updates...whether that cost ends up being monetary in that you pay
someone to do the dirty work for you...or the cost is in your personal
time in an effort to support yourself..there is a cost. 

If anything...Fedora has the potential, through the Fedora Legacy to
explore more ways on how to deal with the cost of prolonged maintenance.
Will fedora legacy be a place where a volunteer effort to burden that
cost take root? Will fedora legacy provide a framework where different
for pay service providers compete for customers and at the same time
give back to the community? Can fedora legacy be something useful for
equipment builders aiming at customers who have different needs than
what the RHEL solution provides?  

There are a lot of competing interests involved with distribution
building...and I can very much see how prolonged maintenance is not
something near and dear to the hearts of project developers, the people
writing a significant amount of the code thats going into fedora core. 
But as policies develop I hope Fedora Legacy will be molded into a
useful solution where the community members primarily interested in
having a longer maintance lifetime can scratch their itch, and over time
gain influence in the new regime.

-jef
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