Creator here, happy to answer any questions about what it takes to build a collaborative Wiki for tracking support life cycles.
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Should be called The Planned Obsolescence Shaming Site.
In the case of operating systems, do you think 10 or so years of support is not enough?
Brian Lunduke once talked about GNU/Hurd and said they should do the following release cycle:
1. Spend a few months working on it and then declare that the 1.0 release.
2. Spend 2-3 years getting Hurd to work on as many architectures and systems as possible. Get all graphics cards types that you can working. Release 2.0.
3. Spend the next 10-15 years squashing as many bugs as possible. Continue working on getting as many drivers as necessary to get it working on as many platforms as possible. Then release 3.0.
4. At this point be done. For the next 100 years GNU/Hurd 3.0 is it. Just do security and driver updates.
I thought the idea of a “forever” OS was interesting. It would then never become “obsolete”.
In the case of operating systems, do you think 10 or so years of support is not enough?
Yes, I do think that is not enough. An OS should be thought of as scaffolding where parts of it are replaced but never the whole. And preferably while it is running, including all of the core.
In a way, rolling release linux distros meet your requirements.
Still reboots though, doesn't it?
I know there are features to hotpatch the kernel, don’t know if that’s limited to Red Hat or Ubuntu or if something like Arch can do it too.
If individual packages or services have to restart does not qualify for your requirements then I don’t think any system could truly provide that without having it run multiple instances of each service/itself.
I've used QnX and a home grown clone that could do this. In... 1991. Erlang can do it too.
Huh never knew that was their plan, such a shame Hurd isn't completed! I wonder if such a vision could be possible with a simpler os like FreeRTOS or similar
That’s not the actual plan for GNU Hurd that was Brian wishcasting.
In the 80s Ian Sommerville wrote about the "long tail" of maintenance accounting for >75% of the lifecycle costs of a program. I remember being surprised at this, but my SE prof saying "all successful projects tend toward 100% maintenance."
If developers want to put a time limit on how long they're willing to maintain a project that's all fine and useful. Coders have lives to get back to and new interests to look forward to.
But the very idea of software having a pre-defined lifespan is not sensible. Do we put expiry dates on mathematical theorems?
Indeed it's a good argument for why all software should be FOSS, because it's ultimately the users of a program, not the developers that decide whether code has continuing utility.
As soon as money comes into development people start noticing the long tail is a precipice of diminishing returns, We act like landlords who can't be bothered to decorate crumbling buildings we rent out. Easier to knock it down and build anew, regardless the disruption for the tenants.
When software is built and maintained by the community that use it, they're more like homeowners, for whom maintenance is adding value to an asset.
Sure, you can maintain it if you want. And they ought to give you the means to. But that’s a bad comparison.
I bought a perfect, will never deteriorate houseboat twenty years ago (it is now 2043) and moved it across the world. But now in the harbor of Hong Kong I won’t get a permit to stay there because there is (1) no onboard emergency manual in either Cantonese or Mandarin, and (2) it is not up to code for sustained quarantine due to the novel airborne virus that became a pandemic some years ago, and (3) there is no mounted non-lethal (because animal welfare) protection against a hull-eating[1] marina pest that migrated from the Equator ten years ago because of climate change.
Software obsolescence is all about the world changing around the software.
[1] The boat might be perfect but apparently creatures can still eat it if determined enough.
Love the hull eating creatures that must only be humanely killed. Yeah, things never stand still. And those best equipt and informed to make changes for changing times are end-users in whatever context they find themselves, post-apocalypse or otherwise :)
Who is going to pay for development?
great metaphor
But the very idea of software having a pre-defined lifespan is not sensible. Do we put expiry dates on mathematical theorems?
IMO it made a lot of sense when the hardware was changing rapidly - when the speed of new hardware doubled every year or two, maintaining existing hardware for more than a decade or two was often just a bad idea. And new hardware usually means porting or rewriting the software.
Nowadays though, hardware has largely peaked - CPUs are getting faster, but not that much faster. We won't see five doublings of CPU speed (64x increase) in our lifetimes, let alone in a decade. Security issues and repairability aside, today's hardware and operating systems will be perfectly serviceable in, say, 30 years.
Most of stuff there still works just not supported. You are free to run Java 2 or Windows 95, just you won't get any free support for it forever. Check with MS for right money they may even support it.
Thankfully it’s a practical informational website and not something frivolous like that.
i read this literally, was going to look up some stuff for an ageing parent
Also not a native speaker, but the second "of" makes that interpretation impossible (in theory, obviously not for you in practice).
I thought it would be about Sarco pods and exit bags.
Same! English can be so tricky!
This nicely shows how insane the world is that we live in. There are many core pieces of technology on that site and almost all of them go EOL within 2 or 3 years. Anything that builds upon these pieces of technology will take some time to support the new version, so the time frame is actually even shorter.
Yea, some of these (e.g. PHP) have dozens of minor/bug fix releases which then just suddenly stop which just shows that you're vulnerable all the time... either because the release isn't "mature yet" or because it's "already eol" :)
Nothing ever gets "mature" in today's web development environment. As soon as something becomes stable, people don't find it exciting anymore so the devs need to introduce new features, create new bugs, and make backward-incompatible changes.
If you want to keep your sanity and focus on building an actual business on a solid foundation, ignore all the upstream EOLs and just use a major stable Linux distro that promises to backport security fixes for 5+ years. The peace of mind is totally worth the larger container size.
why is the sidebar not on the side, so frustrating to use
Sorry, can you clarify - you'd like the site to take full-width and the sidebar to be left-aligned?
Something like this? https://imgur.com/E0Wkxrt
I’m not GP but my problem with the sidebar is, at least on iPadOS, it does not scroll to match the page on the screen. Most times it scrolls the sidebar way too far and I can’t quickly flip through two or three similarly named pages. For example, I was trying to look at both Microsoft .NET pages.
Very nice, I never heard of that site before. A possible addition, for hardware devices, could be a field reporting their environmental footprint, that is, how much waste is produced by simply marking a product as obsolete forcing users to ditch it instead of opening it so that it can be repurposed by the community by installing lighter OSes and apps, or reused in completely different contexts (example: old phone -> IoT terminal)
PRs welcome, although I think this is more suited to something like Wikidata. As I noted elsewhere, the lack of standard identifiers for devices makes this especially hard. Companies will often release the same hardware with different model numbers at different timelines and support cycles across different geographies.
The metric to track is probably “lifetime emissions”, which a few vendors report. The majority of these are actually from manufacturing and not lifetime, resulting in every upgrade becoming an emission spike(?)
I've recently updated the Lambda functions to Amazon Linux 2023, only to find that its standard support apparently expires earlier than that of the older Amazon Linux 2.
The lambda runtimes are separately documented: https://endoflife.date/aws-lambda
Maybe also smartwatches as features increasingly include health algorithms based on the sensors involved? You could also get grants in that direction.
I love this site. Has been my go to for years for quickly looking up EOL info for literally every major piece of software in our tech/infra/platform stack. Props to the maintainers.
Related:
End-of-life dates - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30499023 - Feb 2022 (54 comments)
Show HN: Endoflife.date – Site with EOL dates of everything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033728 - May 2019 (80 comments)
Crowd sourced EOL docs. I like it!
Pretty nice to have this level of openness on a data set. In my dreamworld all the data would be in Wikidata.
A Thinkpad doesn't have an End of Life. It just passes down from generation to generation.
Show HN: from 2019
Thanks for the site. It answered a question I had in the back of my mind, but hadn't found the time to look up.
One suggestion I hope you can look into: the Java world is a lot bigger than just Oracle Java, with multiple implementations where End-of-Life greatly differs. If possible, people avoid Oracle Java. Look up OpenJDK, Eclipse Temurin, Azul, IBM Semeru. There are some more, but I have never used them.
Seconding this. As it stands, the Java page is only of very limited use.
Does this help: https://endoflife.date/tags/java-distribution
Yes, though it would be more helpful to have a comparison chart of the various (Open)JDK distributions, because for most purposes they are exchangeable, apart from the support terms.
https://endoflife.date/openjdk-builds-from-oracle
https://endoflife.date/microsoft-build-of-openjdk
https://endoflife.date/redhat-build-of-openjdk
https://endoflife.date/eclipse-temurin
https://endoflife.date/azul-zulu
https://endoflife.date/ibm-semeru-runtime
https://endoflife.date/amazon-corretto
We already track almost all of them. https://endoflife.date/tags/java-distribution
We have to redirect the /java page here, but stalled by some housekeeping of separating the 2 Oracle JRE pages.
Amazon Corretto 8 is widely used in the Finance industry for example
Thanks for making this. I really like it.
Do you have plans to monetize it? I hope not. Because this is a thing that should exist in the world. I would much rather support this via donations than ads or anything else.
OpenCollective says that the total donations are $1,107.75 USD with 6 contributors. I threw another 20 bucks at them after reading that, but it seems like at least ads or something would make sense purely from a financial perspective, since even with 8M impressions, not that many are interested in donating sadly.
I do really enjoy the site, it has lots of technologies listed and looks very pleasant. Actually used it just this week, since I started building an API with the previous .NET LTS version but a new one came out, so I suddenly started having to install older package versions for compatibility reasons hah.
What are the operational costs of running such a site?
Currently none, but that's mostly because we've worked hard to keep it that way. I publish finance updates on a GitHub Discussion (https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/discussions...). We used to pay $9/mo for Netlify Analytics but didn't find it helpful.
We're looking to join OpenEoX.org to standardize EoL information publication, but that requires a lot more funds (https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/discussions...).
We also have a pretty long roadmap (https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/issues/2108) that focuses on integrating better with the sbom ecosystem (We want to make an API that does SBOM->EOL alerts for eg). Such projects require a lot of development effort, and we'd like to be able to sponsor it on our own (via grants/donations).
You could consider making more expensive features paid options? Definitely tradeoffs there but it is an option, especially for business-useful features
This is a great idea. Hopefully this gets more attention and resources. You're really well positioned to fill a gap in the ecosystem.
Setting aside a HN spike, $100 a year should be fine for hosting. Or use someone else’s hosting platform like GitHub, cloudflare etc for the cost of a domain name.
Could be a very useful resource. There have been a couple of occasions when I've found it harder than it should be to find EOL information.
Of course sometimes there isn't any because many small projects have no official support cycle, but sometimes projects of significance, and even some commercial products, don't either. But sometimes there is and it isn't well documented (or sufficiently linked so it is hard to find).
Would you consider adding a timeline-like view, for instance pages listing everything due to go EOL or move between support categories (current, still under standard support, extended (full LTS), extended (limited, i.e. security only or common packages only)) this/next month/quarter/year? Those pages could be static and refreshed daily rather than needing resource to generate on each visit (filtering could be done client-side to allow more flexibility without extra server resource for dynamic generation). This could be done by a 3rd-party, but that might involve scraping the API/site in a way that imparts an unfriendly amount of load (unless I'm missing something, the data in the release-data repo doesn't contain everything that would be needed for this).
In the case of commercial products it is especially frustrating if you need to log in to some customer portal in order to find such basic product information. And even if you create an account and log in it is not guaranteed to find this information. I can relate to a certain extend as some companies might not even know when they plan to end support for a product, but even this is information that is worth sharing with their customers.
Fortigate is one such vendor we already cover, such information deserves to be free not behind login or paywalls.
Yes, we have an open issue for such timelines (https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/issues/2148). Your comment has given me the idea to implement it on our "tag" pages, so you could see the timeline for all java-runtimes in one place for eg.
Generating pages isn't hard for us. We maintain it in our frontmatter/yaml (See https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/blob/master... for example). The release-data repo is for tracking new releases of upstream products so we can patch the latest version automatically, and get notified of new major releases that are missing in our tables. release-data is a much smaller subset of our data, and doesn't include the critical EOL data.
Can you create a Hall of Fame/Shame view which lists the top/bottom n products by longest support period?
It would be nice if these projects competed to get on the leaderboard.
I think calling it the Hall of Fame/Shame is unjustified.
I certainly agree when we talk about hardware products, because having very short support periods for those just seems wasteful.
But it gets difficult when entering software, because it probably differs from user to user how fast they would like the software to evolve. I can think of software that I want to be boring and work forever the way it does now without changing (except security bug fixes ..). So support periods are long and consist only of patch releases. And then there is software where I am waiting eagerly for new features to be added and would like the maintainers/the company to focus their attention on it if possible, thus taking resources from the maintenance side of things and moving them to the feature-factory. So support periods may be short and major/minor release bumps happen frequently.
Having one of these products in the Hall of Fame and another rot in the Hall of Shame does not seem to add any informational value.
I'm not sure if that's a good idea. Maintaining long-term-support, especially for open-source projects with volunteers is a unacknowledged (and often unpaid) work.
It might make sense for certain categories (Mobiles, tablets) but it is so hard to get good data for those.
Thank you for making it.
- Would like a time line view: as of the next few months, what are expiring.
- Would like to see a stability score for a Product / Stack, you define the metrics for what is considered stable vs obsolete. How it compares with other similar categories.
We have an open issue for a timeline view: https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/issues/2148
Second is very subjective. If there's onething that I've learnt over the years working on this - it is that the definition of "support" is very fuzzy. You can't even compare what "LTS" means between different stacks/products, so it is hard to objectively rate anything. It still might be worth doing some analysis and publishing as a blog post though, but i'm not sure if it can be automatically calculated.
I just want to say that I love this and have it bookmarked! I've moved into my 30s and am now thinking about life "maintenance first" and this will be a helpful resource for planning.
I imagine the only help y'all need is for us to update EOL info when we see it?
Yes, great it like a Wiki. Additions of new products are also welcome, as is building tooling on our API or improving our release automation so we track releases better.
Have you considered offering a subscription-based service? (e.g. for timely notifications / compliance reporting / etc.)
1. We already have a calendar feed that you can subscribe to, for every product that will warn you accordingly.
2. We have an API (endoflife.date/api) and a upcoming v1 API (https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/pull/2080) to let everyone use our data.
3. there's already a ton of companies/products that use the api/dataset (https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/wiki/Known-...)
We plan to launch some services (https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/issues/2108), but it will still be free.
We treat it as a community-built-semantic-wiki. Feedback is welcome.
Naively, would there be any value in providing an RSS feed of new adds, date changes, etc. ?
New additions probably make sense.
Stock RSS feeds don’t work for future events, so they aren’t perfect for our usecase (warn users in advance of an upcoming date), so we offer ICS feeds instead.
RSS feed of just date changes might work, but ‘s hard to differentiate between a change that creates a feed notification vs one that doesn’t (new release, typo fix, date change by 2 days, and so on…)
Great effort! As I’ve realized the folly of updating my phone every 2-3 years, have you considered a sign up to be notified that my device is reaching its end of life?
As an example, my cellular provider gives a discount assuming I’ll be BYOD for the next three years. I’m really curious if I can make it past those three years. It would mean my phone is 5 years old at that point.
Great website, note that .NET doesn't show .NET Framework content, with latest being .NET Framework 4.8.1.
.NET Framework support is tied to Windows itself.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-GB/lifecycle/faq/dotnet-frame...
We track .NET framework separately (https://endoflife.date/dotnetfx), which mentions that the "support-tied-to-windows" policy applies in specific cases:
I take it Samsung doesn't typically announce their products' support times, given that most of them just have a "Yes" instead of a date?
Yes. we sometimes track such times using web archive, but it's not perfect and its easier to just use yes/no (See https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/pull/4235 for eg).
This is an amazing project!
Could there also be something like a comparison view of devices and models where you can see overlapped timelines when support ended (e.g. in the past vs now?)
Also, something like repairability scores from e.g. ifixit would be amazing to integrate.
Whenever I am looking for devices, I am also on the lookout for whether or not a third party OS has upstream support for it at the time of buying (e.g. LineageOS or postmarketOS wiki) because the device isn't "just a dead thing" when there's an OS available that you can flash on it.
I tried to generate a visual timeline for a given page (https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/pull/2859, has some screenshots), but it was limited to a single page (so you'd only see nokia devices at once for eg).
It turned out that it is too hard to generate clear charts with vague data. We often only know whether is device is supported or not (true/false, see comments about samsung below in this thread), and don't have clear release dates.
I'll get to it someday (PRs welcome), but it might not work for the usecase we want (picking phones) because data on mobiles is very vague.
repairability score -> sounds interesting, will file an issue and see. The hard part is that there's no clear identifiers for devices (SWID/CPE are just not good enough) for us to track this kind of data from elsewhere easily.
Thank you for creating this.
We keep track of EOL dates in our internal wiki with links to various websites. Would be nice to reduce the scatter and just link to this site!
Would you accept Pull Requests that add server hardware EOS and EOL dates? They are especially hard to find and it would be great to have them in there as well!
Edit: I should have taken a look at open issues first, it seems there is tracking issue for network equipment so I guess adding server hardware is certainly not off the table (https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/issues/1387).