Effective Monday, December 10th 2001, after a lifespan of two years, SuSE will discontinue support for the successful SuSE Linux distribution SuSE Linux 6.3. This has potential security implications for those running this version of the OS.
Roman Drahtmueller from SuSe said: "SuSE puts much effort into adding security improvements (patches) to the software instead of publishing a new version. In some cases however, especially if the security leak is based on problematic design decisions or when the fix(es) are fairly large, the only reasonable fix for a security problem is to update to a newer version of the software. These newer versions tend to become incompatible with older distribution releases because of missing features in the operating system environment This forces us to focus on the distributions of a newer release date."