Red Hat has added an additional 3 years to support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) via its new "Extended Life Cycle Support" (ELS). Available as a paid subscription, the added package prolongs the support of the Linux distribution for corporate customers from seven to ten years; this of particular interest to customers who are currently still using RHEL3, which was released in October 2003, as the regular support for this distribution will expire at the end of October.

Similar to the third phase of the "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle", the ELS will focus on fixing critical flaws rather than providing any major new features. Furthermore, the support is only available for selected components of the distribution – numerous programs mainly used on desktop systems are excluded from the support contract. It remains to be seen if RHEL clones, such as CentOS, will also provide extended support .

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