asterisk users - Sep 2014 - Asterisk 1.8 - Security Fix Only Notice

Hey everyone!

Way back in the murky days of 2010, the Asterisk project released the
first version of Asterisk 1.8. This was the first release following a
new policy of alternating Long Term Support (LTS) releases and
Standard releases. As the first LTS release, Asterisk 1.8 was quite
the milestone -- as a project, we officially committed ourselves to
its maintenance for four years!

Since its release, Asterisk 1.8 has been immensely successful. With a
lot of hard effort by the Asterisk community, it quickly matured into
a stable platform. That success can be seen in the subsequent releases
of Asterisk, which built heavily on the Asterisk 1.8 architecture.
Asterisk 10 (Standard release) took some evolutionary leaps with a new
media architecture and better conferencing capabilities, while
Asterisk 11 (LTS releases) provided many useful end-user features --
as well as initial WebRTC support and a new XMPP channel driver. None
of this would have been possible without the work done in Asterisk
1.8.

The current release policy was set up so that users would have a
significant amount of time to migrate from one LTS release to the
next. With Asterisk 11 being released in 2012, users of Asterisk 1.8
have had about two years to migrate to that LTS release. Alas, that
window of time is about nearly done.

In October of 2014, Asterisk 1.8 will officially enter 'Security Fix
Only' only mode. The next release of Asterisk 1.8, Asterisk 1.8.32.0,
is planned to be the final bug fix release of Asterisk 1.8. Following
that, no more bug fix releases will be made for Asterisk 1.8. If a
security vulnerability is identified, a security release from 1.8.32
will be made that includes the fix for that vulnerability. That level
of support will continue for another year. In October of 2015,
Asterisk 1.8 will officially enter End-Of-Life.

We encourage users of Asterisk 1.8 to consider moving to the next
Asterisk LTS, Asterisk 11, at their earliest convenience.

For more information on Asterisk versions, please see the Asterisk wiki:

https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+Versions

The success of Asterisk 1.8 is due to the involvement and support of
the Asterisk community. As always, thank you for your support of
Asterisk!

Matt

-- 
Matthew Jordan
Digium, Inc. | Engineering Manager
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at: http://digium.com & http://asterisk.org