Canonical provides Long Term Support to 12 years

Ubuntu is one of most used Linux distribution and it is in the market for almost 20 years. Canonical currently provides support from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) which was released on the year 2014. Usually each Ubuntu release gets 5 years of support. 

Canonical offers Ubuntu pro subscription which is paid subscription for Enterprise customers but free for personnel use. If user subscribed to this plan then they will get 10 years of maintenance support. 

Now Canonical offers an Legacy add-on support where they plan to provide additional 2 years of support which would be total 12 years for every Ubuntu release. This will be a paid subscription for both Enterprise and normal users.

This is really great move and it gives peace of mind to users. Upgrading operating system may not be easy task for production systems. There will be downtime so most of the organizations will prefer to continue with the same version of the OS. 

Even though it is a paid subscription, providing support is not easy task. Back porting the fixes to older version is difficult and Canonical is doing this to keep its customers happy. 

Being lover of open source, Appreciate the support provided by Canonical.