[flukus]

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.

[jaredklewis]

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

[flukus]

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.