The open-source Fedora Legacy Project is now shutting down. It's no longer supporting Fedora Core 4 and earlier. On the website it says, "The current model for supporting maintenance distributions is being re-examined. In the meantime, we are unable to extend support to older Fedora Core releases as we had planned."

The Fedora Legacy Project is a sub-project of Red Hat, dedicated to supporting older Fedora Core and Red Hat Linux releases by providing security and bug fixes. The point is to continue providing support and add new life for corporations who still have not upgraded or cannot upgrade to the latest versions of Fedora.

Another thing that the Fedora Legacy warns is that some of their servers may be going away soon, and that "we may find ourselves in a place where 'yum update' commands will fail in the near future for the Red Hat and Fedora Core releases that Legacy has supported in the past."

This is tough luck for a lot of people running older versions of Fedora. Some simply don't have the computer resources to run the latest version of Fedora. Some businesses hold back upgrading because of the vast number of machines that would require the update.

I predict that this will likely lead to more insecure Linux machines, and a lot of changes, perhaps distro or even operating system changes. It's too bad that this project had to be halted.

Of course, most of the support provided to people using outdated versions of Fedora or Red Hat Linux should be considered bonus. Commercial operating system developers, most notably Microsoft and Apple, stop providing support for their older, outdated operating systems after 4 or 5 years.

And when you look at the overall spectrum of Linux users, the lack of support to these users is probably not as bad as it could be.