I think it is telling that in Unity world, 2 years is "Long Term". I wonder what cutting edge is? Building your entire game on the unstable weekly branch and crossing your fingers?

Not just unity unfortunately. .net core LTS is 3 years, Firefox "extended support" is 12 months, some random library from cargo/npm/nuget probably not at all. "Long Term" is becoming a meaningless buzzword.

Companies cling to 40 year old COBOL because there's nothing stable enough to migrate to.

Java 8 EOL is 2030. There are plenty of stable options that are not COBOL.

Java has been one of the few that are more stable but I get the impression that's coming to an end. The support lifetime for the current LTS will finish 4 years earlier than Java 8 (according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history) so it's trending down fast (although still good). It also looks that 2030 is only for people paying oracle, which isn't necessarily bad but it's something to consider.

There's also a lot more to consider than just how long an LTS lasts, like the degree of backwards compatibility and the rest of the ecosystem. It was my understanding that project jigsaw broke a lot of that, but I'm outside the java world so i didn't really keep up. .net for instance was great until recently because they had decent support lifetimes and kept backwards compatibility, so updating to the latest was at least simple and painless. Even trying to do those upgrades was like pulling teeth inside corporate environments though.

Most software products LTS are between 2 to 3 years actually, even stuff like Java.

There's how often LTS releases are released, and how long they are supported.

Ubuntu cuts an LTS release every 2 years, but they support them for 5 years.

It appears Oracle supports Java LTS releases for 8 years.

Java LTS model has changed for 3 years for releases past Java 9. We are on 14 already.

There's a difference between end-user software and software that you're going to produce things in.

2 years is a reasonable time to expect that the user will move on to the next LTS browser version. 2 years is not a lot of time to release a game without having to upgrade the engine mid-project.

Java SE 8 (LTS) March 2014 December 2030 Java may have a new LTS every few years, but they support their LTS releases for much longer.

That is the old model, the new LTS model is three years.

Oracle just extended it due to Java 9 being our Python 3, which is kind of pointless because all the packages that matter have migrated already.

But enterprise being enterprise, there are plenty of projects only now migrating to 8, and then there is that little robot that isn't even fully compliant with 8.

Not that I really know much about Java stuff, but it looks like maybe Amazon/OpenJDK are providing longer support lifetimes? [1]

And here's an official Oracle doc regarding Java support where they show Java 11 (LTS) being supported until either late 2023 or late 2026 depending on your support level. I'm not sure they provide free support anymore, or maybe that's limited and what you're referring to?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history

2: https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/java-se-support-roa...

Yes, free support is only three years.

Java has several commercial and free implementations, so every Java vendor is free to choose their own timelines, I was only talking about the free layer of OpenJDK/Oracle, as that is what many around here understand as Java.