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by pron 994 days ago
Organisations that care about new features need to reconsider their stance on using Preview features and even more importantly sticking to versions for which the sales org offers an LTS service. The whole concept of LTS is designed for companies that are so uninterested in new features (often because their software is no longer heavily maintained) that they're willing to pay money not to receive them. There are a lot of such projects around, and the fact that non-legacy projects choose old versions and an LTS service shows that the ecosystem still hasn't adapted to the new release model.
2 comments
cogman10 993 days ago
While I tend to agree, it's just a losing battle (in my experience). The issue is that shockingly few people in organizations actually care about language improvements. Further, because orgs prioritize spitting out new features above all else, selling maintenance work like updating the JVM is seen more as pure waste than actual benefit to the company.

The one argument I've been able to make to get an update is "This has fallen out of support and will no longer get security updates". That seems to be the only motivator for my company to do updates.

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thfuran 993 days ago
That seems like a bad faith interpretation. Upgrading has both costs and risks. Even upgrades within the same major version can break things. LTS is about paying for stability, not a lack of features.
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pron 993 days ago
Well, yes, but in the past the versions that now get a new integer number (feature releases) were mandatory for everyone and there was no LTS at all. There were some differences, but not as big as many think. The biggest one was the psychological aspect of the name (7u4 or 8u20, which were not patch releases but big feature releases).

So why did we create the LTS service? 1. Because the new feature releases, while no more risky than the old ones (like 7u4 and 8u20), do require a little more work that companies don't want to put into legacy applications, and 2. Many companies indeed are willing to pay for more stability for their legacy apps.

So while it is absolutely true that some projects want better stability, this level of stability is new. Companies that religiously stick to old versions now didn't do that in the past. The simplest explanation is that the new release model isn't yet understood, not that thousands of companies changed their risk strategy.

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