-----Original Message----- From: development-bounces@drupal.org

I reread Jonathans posts twice, becuase this problem really interests me (I studied operational engineering: Maintaining and upgrading large technical facilities such as powerplants)

I work in a huge datacenter where we manage k's of hosts for customers, so this interest me as well. As a general rule of thumb, we have the following policy. We upgrade: 1) if the /customer/ wants it and hence pays for it (new functionality / external resons) 2) if /operations/ wants it because it is cheaper to maintain a box (operational costs /internal reasons) 3) if /customer/operations/ want it due to securtity risks (preventing imago/repair costs) (note: 3 includes lifecycle management aka EOL as is the case with 4.5 right now) These are imho the only valid reasons to upgrade, oss or proprietary code. The fact that you dont have any license costs for oss doesnt change this, neither the fact that bazaar style coding gives you faster updates with more functionality. These are just parameters within these rules. Anyone is free to upgrade or not. The only thing that we have to do is to state what the criteria are for supporting older versions. And if you think you need support for older versions, anyone is free to start coding for 4.1 or buy support. I wouldnt call it smart though or futureproof.