Organizations that are still running Debian 9 servers should be aware that the security support of the Debian LTS team will end on June 30th 2022.

If upgrading to a newer Debian release is not an option for them, then they should consider subscribing to Freexian’s Extended LTS to get security support for the packages that they are using on their servers.

It’s worth pointing out that we made some important changes to Freexian’s Extended LTS offering :

• we are now willing to support each Debian release for up to 10 years (so 5 years of ELTS support after the 5 initial years), provided that we have customers willing to pay the required amount.
• we have changed our pricing scheme so that we can announce up-front the (increasing) cost over the 5 years of ELTS
• we have dropped the requirement to subscribe to the Debian LTS sponsorship, though it’s still a good idea to contribute to the funding of that project to ensure that one’s packages are properly monitored/maintained during the LTS period

This means that we have again extended the life of Debian 8 Jessie, this time until June 30th 2025. And that Debian 9 Stretch – that will start its “extended” life on July 1st 2022 – can be maintained up to June 30th 2027.

Organizations using Debian 10 should consider sponsoring the Debian LTS team since security support for that Debian release will soon transition from the regular security team to the LTS team.

Just like we did for Debian 7 Wheezy, some of the paid Debian LTS contributors will continue to maintain Debian 8 Jessie after its 5 years of support as part of Freexian’s Extended LTS service.

This service works differently than regular LTS:

• only the packages used by the sponsors are supported;
• the updates are provided in an external repository managed by Freexian so that Debian teams can bury Debian 8 Jessie and move on;
• the cost of the service for each sponsor is evaluated each semester based on the number of packages that they want to see supported and the number of other sponsors with similar needs;
• a limited set of architectures is supported (usually only amd64 and i386, but for Jessie it might be that we end up supporting armel due to a sponsor requesting it).

Some packages will not be supported:

• linux 3.16 (instead we will likely continue to maintain the linux-4.9 backport from Debian 9 stretch)
• openjdk-7 (its EOL is on June 2020), we might maintain a backport of openjdk-8 if there’s demand for it
• tomcat7 will only be supported until its EOL in March 2021
• this list might be expanded over time when we discover issues rendering security support infeasible on some packages

If you expect to have Debian 8 servers/devices running after June 30th 2020, and would like to have security updates for them, please get in touch with us. We’re building a list of potential sponsors right now and we expect to provide cost estimations at the end of the month.