This not only benefits the high-paying customers of RHEL, but also benefits the derivatives of RedHat. CentOS has already extended their support timelines and while Scientific Linux hasn't extended their end-of-life timeline, there's a pretty good chance they will.
While many operating system upgrades are quick and easy, and while periodic updates is a good idea, it's nice to have the ability to continue using an older operating system and stay current with security fixes.
Indeed, I still use CentOS 5 for MaraDNS development, since I haven't had the time to update MaraDNS' regressions for Scientific Linux 6/CentOS 6.
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