This has not been my experience over the last 20 years across multiple industries. Generally I'd expect (and have written into an SLA) a minimum of 2 years support for anything even vaguely critical. If using Open Source I'd be buying from a vendor who would guarantee that level of support. I acknowledge it's different if you're working for an early stage startup designing the next tinder for marmosets or whatever in which case you probably don't care about support windows because you're likely to crash and burn within your support window.

I've worked across industries in everything from a 2-person startup to an F500 investment bank, and I've very rarely seen a 2 year SLA for anything. (Rolling 6 months was the standard at the investment bank). Buying all your open source frameworks is an expensive luxury (and rarely worth anything), at least if you're in a position where you actually need to deliver.

So you're saying that you've never worked somewhere where the base OS was an old version of Red Hat that was still supported, probably 5-7 years after release?

Now that I think about it I have seen computer running an OS like that, but only for the machine that was running the Oracle database that let the CTO get his golf buddy a $50k/month sale, never on one that was actually being used to do something.

This is standard operating procedure for financial institutions in Europe, at least. And many, many other types of enterprises.

For core banking and other mission critical systems. Nobody upgrades an OS for fun, especially when the checklist for doing so is longer than both my arms put together.

Not every financial institution in Europe, I assure you. The one I worked with actually had a policy that anything that hadn't been updated in six months had to be signed off as it was considered a risk factor.

I think we might be talking past each other and you may have missed the original point.

This is not about security updates.

This is about using old, but still updated LTS/enterprise versions.

I don't know <<any>> enterprise mandating upgrade to the latest LTS within 6 months. Most do it 6 months before the old LTS period will expire :-))

Hmm. The policy was "a release published in the last 6 months", which sure, could theoretically be an old LTS branch. There certainly wasn't a culture of doing that though. I remember a huge scramble to move everything over to Java 11 (honestly a lot scarier than an OS upgrade in that context) which I'm pretty sure was based around 6 months after the first release of Java 11 rather than the EOL date for Java 8, but it's possible those were the same thing.

Well, I'll tell you how I know the policy I'm talking about is more popular than the one you're talking about: LTSes themselves, and vendors offering extended, enterprise support for old software in general and OSes in particular.

If enterprises would consistently and massively upgrade early (for example within 1 year of a new release), vendors wouldn't need to offer this super long support on such a widespread scale. There's a reason Windows Server is supported for so many years, or RHEL, or SLES, or Solaris, or whatever.

It's popular if you weight by dollar spend, sure. That doesn't mean it's popular if you're weighting by actual productivity.

As others have pointed out LTS exists elsewhere - the truth is LTS is minimum level of support necessary for most users. Everything else is essentially bleeding edge - too much work to maintain, constantly bugged, etc.

The previous model where a major change could have support last for decades, where the system was modular in that patches could apply to any major version - that was gold.

Unfortunately today we have this "yesterday's tech is garbage" attitude, and honeslty it is mostly making all software garbage.