14 DAY TRIAL // Red Hat has just announced the launch of the Extended Life Cycle Support program for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This means that customers using versions of RHEL for which regular support is about to expire can ensure that they'll receive updates for three more years by purchasing the optional support offering.
"Today, the Red Hat team is excited to launch Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is an optional subscription offering that provides support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for longer than its standard seven-year life cycle," Red Hat said in statement.
"With Extended Life Cycle Support customers can receive limited software maintenance and technical support services for an additional three years, extending the life cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to a full ten years," the announcement added.
While Extended Live Cycle Support applies to all RHEL versions, those targeted by the announcement are the ones still using RHEL 3, which is coming close to the end of its seven years of support.
Launched in 2003, RHEL 3 won't receive regular updates after October 31, 2010. Existing users are urged to upgrade to a newer version, the latest stable release is RHEL 5 and RHEL 6 is slated for launch sometimes this year.
However, if, for whatever reason, customers aren't able to make the switch, they can purchase the ELS which will ensure another three years of limited updates. These updates will cover security fixes and similar issues, but don't apply to all of the packages shipped with RHEL 3.
ELS doesn't cover packages such as Cdparanoia, CUPS, Evolution, GDM, GIMP, GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Pidgin, Samba and others. Basically, none of the desktop applications will be supported. You can check out the full list here.
With the ELCS, RHEL 3 will be supported until October 2013.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is available for download here on Softpedia.