While most companies and agencies have migrated their sites to more recent versions, there is still a large amount of sites that would need the 4.5 LTS for some longer time. The CMS team and the TYPO3 Association came to the conclusion that this needs to be addressed. We like to encourage everybody to update their sites to TYPO3 CMS 6.2 LTS. Among all the new features and possibilities, 6.2 contains major security features that are not available in 4.5. Among them are secure entry points and CSRF protection (<link en.wikipedia.org wiki cross-site_request_forgery>
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery), which protects users from submitting bad data into the TYPO3 system without proper authorization.
However, there are still reasons why people cannot update in time for the end of support lifetime on March 31st, 2015. We investigated the real-life cases and came to the conclusion that there is a number of projects that have trouble updating in the timeframe of the overlapping LTS versions. There are multiple factors playing a role in not updating a site until now: Existing sites that only run until the end of the year 2015, or projects where the whole infrastructure still runs on PHP 5.2, which is still supported by RHEL and SUSE Enterprise Linux for example - a version of PHP that is not supported by more recent TYPO3 CMS versions. Some larger corporations need to have legitimate proof that all software they use is still officially supported and covered by security updates. The other cases are small sites, which do not have the money for an upgrade at hand, or will do a relaunch within the next year anyway.
The TYPO3 Association and the TYPO3 CMS team, among them CMS Team Co leader Benni Mack, TYPO3 CMS Product Manager Mathias Schreiber and Lead Architect Christian Kuhn, have therefore agreed to keep the version 4.5 security supported for another year. Although TYPO3 is all open source, we will charge some support and maintenance work for this premium service and setting up custom infrastructure for that. We call it “4.5 Extended LTS”.
How does it work?
Starting on March 31st, 2015, there will be a private repository available to all subscribers of the extended LTS branch. This repository will contain the TYPO3 version 4.5.40. It will get any security fix that will pop up in the security team which is relevant for the 4.5 version in order to keep 4.5 as secure and stable as it is. Security and stability have highest priority in the Extended LTS. All subscribers will receive information about new releases via email and can download the latest version via Git. The extended support for 4.5 is planned to end on March 31st, 2016.
How much will it cost?
To become a subscriber an agency, end-client, corporation or single person can order an extended 4.5 support plan. Any subscriber will gain access to the Extended LTS branch. There are 4 different plans for subscribers.
Single Plan
EUR 2,000.00 per TYPO3 Instance *.
Pro Plan
EUR 8,000.00 for up to 5 TYPO3 Instances *.
Agency Unlimited Plan
EUR 15,000.00 for unlimited TYPO3 Instances *.
Custom Plan
In case a customer wants to sponsor an amount higher than laid out in the Standard Plans above, custom plans can be negotiated.
Note: a “TYPO3 Instance” is one TYPO3 environment in use for Testing, Staging and ProductionHow does GPL v2 license and open source work together with this model?
TYPO3 CMS is and will always stay free. In theory, any subscriber who paid for our support work could publish the TYPO3 version with the security and stability fixes applied to the public for free. This is GPL v2. For the best of the project and the future of TYPO3 CMS, we encourage everybody with the need for 4.5 to buy the extended support, as any budget left-over from the work will be used 100% for the further development of TYPO3 CMS 7 and CMS 8.
Why do we do this?
While we encourage everybody to upgrade their sites to TYPO3 CMS 6.2 LTS, we do understand there is a demand for an extended support period because a migration can become a huge task.
There are customers that just need more time to organize the upgrade to newer TYPO3 versions due to operative boundaries like budget plans, team meetings etc. that can take a lot of time in internationally acting businesses.
It is important to make absolutely clear that it is not intended to run older TYPO3 versions for a longer period of time so this support plans are only a temporary solution to cover the time until the migration to a newer, supported TYPO3 version can be handled.
Please contact <link>Mathias Schreiber, Product Owner of TYPO3 CMS, for details, consulting or to order the right support plan for you or <link>take a look at this page.
