Google, one of the leading open source and Linux companies, has declared Red Hat's RHEL 6 as obsolete. Jan Wildeboer, a Red Hat evangelist, has found that Google Chrome won't be updated on RHEL 6 anymore.
Google shows a notification which says, "Google Chrome is no longer updating because your operating system is obsolete "
Wildeboer writes on his Google+ page:
Why does Google put users of (at least) Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 at risk by stopping updates for Chrome? While continuing to support Windows XP?
It is surprising as even Windowx XP which is reaching end of life is well supported by Google and GNU/Linux distributions like Ubuntu 10.04 are also well supported.
Wildeboer further writes:
We release new stable versions of RHEL every 2-3 years. The API/ABI stability is what sets it apart from community distros. Customers need long term stability. Google knows (and uses) that itself internally. By cutting the support of enterprise distributions they simply tell me to move elsewhere. That's not a very encouraging thing.
We have reached out to Google and awaiting their response.
Why RHEL 6 is not getting updates?
Chrome, the browser in question here, is based on the open source project Chromium. Chromium developers seems to prefer the new C++11 for the obvious security reasons and ease of maintenance but it also means adopting a new toolchain and upgrading to GCC 4.6. This makes it hard to support those operating systems that ship with older C++ standard libraries. RHEL 6, among many others, is one such operating system.
That's the reason why such operating systems won't be supported by the newer versions of Chrome. Chrome will continue to work on such distributions but it won't get any updates for the above mentioned reasons. So, the notification WildeBoer saw was Google telling such users that their OS won't be supported unless they are upgraded to newer toolchains and GCC.
I think Google and Red Hat can work together to solve this issue.
Source:
Swapnil Bhartiya
A free software fund-a-mental-ist and Charles Bukowski fan, Swapnil also writes fiction and tries to find cracks in a proprietary company's 'paper armours'. He is a big movie buff and prefers listening to music at such high volumes that he's gone partially deaf when it comes to identifying anything positive about proprietary companies. You can follow him on Twitter, Google+ & Facebook. You can write to him on editor at muktware dot com
