Stefan Mileschin

Google has declared Red Hat's RHEL 6 as obsolete which means that users can't use new versions of Chrome.

RHEL 6 was released at the end of 2010 and the next version of RHEL, version 7, will not be released this year.

Effectively Google's move means that users of the latest version of RHEL can't use Chrome until the new one comes out.

Google tells users that their version of Chrome is no longer updating because "your operating system is obsolete".

Needless to say the move is not popular among Red Hat users.

Jan Wildeboer, a Red Hat evangelist, penned an angry missive on his Google+ page which claimed that Google was putting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 at risk by stopping updates for Chrome.

He accused Google of doing this while continuing to support a lame duck like Windows XP.

"It is surprising as even Window XP which is reaching end of life is well supported by Google and GNU/Linux distributions like Ubuntu 10.04 are also well supported," he moaned.

Wildeboer said that there was a new stable versions of RHEL every two to three years and the API/ABI stability is what sets it apart from community distros.

He said that customers needed this long term stability and Google knows that itself internally.

"By cutting the support of enterprise distributions they simply tell me to move elsewhere. That's not a very encouraging thing," Wildeboer growled.

http://news.techeye.net/software/goo...d-hat-obsolete