OpenBSD Releases' Life Cycle

OpenBSD is a non-commercial project, led completely by volunteers. They follow a strict schedule of releasing two versions every year -- May and November.

Many commercial companies continue to support older versions of their products. In OpenBSD, this is simply not possible -- it takes up too much of the developers' time, which can be much better used at hacking at new features or the ongoing security audit. The OpenBSD developers will always support two releases of OpenBSD -- the latest stable version and the immediately previous version. After one year, old versions become deprecated and are not maintained.

Because OpenBSD is free software, this policy should not be much of a problem for administrators. It guarantees the users that OpenBSD will continue to be a high-quality, innovative, functional, secure, and free operating system.