MySQL 4.0 has now reached the final stage of its active development life cycle. As I noted on 12 July 2006 when announcing the MySQL Lifecycle Policy, keeping legacy versions of our software alive is expensive and time-consuming. While we know that database administrators hate to upgrade their databases, we believe that the vast majority of our customers and our community are better served by us focusing our attention on newer releases. However, we don’t want to abandon users of our older products — so we are asking them to help subsidise the cost themselves.

This means that those who wish to continue to receive our support for MySQL 3.23 and MySQL 4.0 will need to be covered by a MySQL Enterprise subscription, starting 1 Oct 2006 for MySQL 4.0.

In practice,

1. We are no longer producing new binary updates for MySQL 4.0 for the
   general public.
2. Soon, we will be removing the archived versions of old MySQL 4.0
   binaries from our web site.
3. The MySQL 4.0 source code will remain available on our web site in tarball format.

As a general rule, we encourage everyone to upgrade from MySQL 4.0 to a newer release.

However, those who wish to continue to get support for MySQL 4.0 during its Extend Lifecycle Timeframe (which will continue for another two years until 31 Dec 2008) are referred to the MySQL Enterprise subscription service.

A MySQL Enterprise subscription will not only give you access to support for older versions, but also assistance with migrating to the most current production release, MySQL 5.0.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 at 11:06 and is filed under MySQL, MySQL Server, Release Policy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.