Apple Forcing Panther Upgrade for Security Patch

The Raindog writes "I noticed over at Tech Report that Apple is apparently only offering its latest round of OS X security fixes to Panther users, leaving older versions of OS X out in the cold. " Update: 10/31 by J : But see the next day's story.

Comments

This will impede corporate use

[47PHA60]

and I think so because of this:

I upgraded my machine at home 10.2.8->10.3. Unfortunately, one piece of software would not work (Silverfast SE, my scanner software. It would not detect the scanner even though the System Profiler showed that it was at SCSI address 2).

It was easy to downgrade to 10.2, then run software update to get back to the 10.2.8 system. Then I realized that there were security updates for 10.3 that were unavailable to me. My choice is security updates, or using my scanner. For now, I have chosen to stick with 10.2.8.

This is OK at home, as I only have on computer behind a firewall, but the dillema is unacceptable at my job.

At work, our CIO, my manager, and several staff use Macs, and we wish we could bring them into the company; our CIO said that the 15" PB is the best computer he has ever used. But, we are still running Windows 2000, and only stopped using NT4 a few months ago, but MS made security patches available up to the end. We continue to download and install security patches for 2000 server and workstation.

I think it is unreasonable to tell a company to upgrade all machines on the vendors' schedule; companies need to control their own upgrade cycle if their environment is to be stable. I work for a financial management company, and we have consistently near-zero downtime, in part because we control our software upgrades. We have a company policy of making no changes the last week of the month when accounts need to be settled, and no changes for one month at the end of the fiscal year so we can close our books. However, critical security fixes are required, after reasonable testing on our QA systems.

If Apple gives us the choice of 1) no security patches after one year max, or b) one critical app stops working on the new version, it means no OS X at work.

Worse, Apple has no clearly stated policy on upgrades, support, patch releases, and end-of-life schedules, and nobody you can get on the phone tells the same story. They are a very secretive company, which does not help when selling to the corporate market. I have read that Apple recently started setting up a corporate sales force, so hopefully this message will get back home and get into the right ears.

And, we don't like Windows, but MS at least tries to get get security fixes out and does state when we can expect support for old releases to stop, so we can make a schedule for ourselves.

Re:Sounds like microsoft tactics

[Kevinv]

See your sig? Maybe you should try and find this RTFM guy. According to him, this security bug DOES NOT EXIST in OS X 10.2 or prior.

And Microsoft doesn't issue patches for 6 year old OS's anymore (how many patches have been released for ME lately?)

MOD PARENT UP PLEASE

[adrianbaugh]

MOD PARENT UP, they have an important point.