Google Says Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Is Obsolete
Found on Muktware on Monday, 11 February 2013
Google, one of the leading open source and Linux companies, has declared Red Hat's RHEL 6 as obsolete. Jan Wildeboer, a Red Hat evangelist, has found that Google Chrome won't be updated on RHEL 6 anymore.
By cutting the support of enterprise distributions they simply tell me to move elsewhere. That's not a very encouraging thing.
That gave me a good laugh. RHEL7 is planned to be released in the second half of 2013 so for now, RHEL6 is the most current release; it's also officially supported for another 7 years. Google is in no position to decide what's obsolete and what's not. As long as an operating system is officially supported, it's not obsolete, simple as that. Now let's put all this a bit into relation: Chrome still supports XP, which was released 2001. It also supports Windows 7, which is available since 2009. However the (according to Google now obsolete) enterprise level distribution from RedHat was released at the end of 2010. Which means that an OS which is a little older than two years (and especially aims to be supported for 10 years) is a no-go in Google's eyes, while it's fine to support systems older than 3 years (or even 12 years in the case of XP). Brilliant reasoning.