Maintenance strategy for KiCAD V5

What is the strategy for KiCAD V5 maintenance?
Will it get updates for bugs and crash fixes?

It would be nice to keep it alive for a little while. I am using it in a production environment and not ready for the move to V6 just yet :slight_smile:

(If this is already addressed in another thread, thanks for linking it below)

5.1 support ended when 6.0 was released. The majority volunteer developers have limited free time and resources to continue work on it.

Commerical/paid support is available for 5.1 if needed from kipro.

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Speculating here: I would be surprised if the commercial vendors of EDA software such as Altium or Cadence offered continuing support for older versions of their software. I think that if one were to complain about bugs or other issues, the complainer would be instructed to upgrade, thereby trading older issues for newer ones. (??)

It’s not commercial software in the usual sense of the word, but for a comparison, fedora linux has two maintained releases going on at the same time, and the “development” version for the next version.
For example, when fedora 35 is the latest stable, 34 receives updates.
When fedora 36 is released, 34 doesn’t receive updates anymore (possibly a short transition period?), but 35 does until 37 is released.
It is helpful from a user perspective, as it gives a smoother transition between versions, but some extra developer resources are needed, which might be in short supply for KiCad.

They do, but again, they are commerical vendors, you pay them yearly maintenance for support and updates are thrown in on the side.

I know someone professionally using PADS from 2013 and Mentor actually provides him hotfixes when he runs into issues.

OK you win. I am surprised!!

Their business model is (large) annual support fees, rather than you buy a version and only pay again when you upgrade

For the OP question, I would only expect fixes for some bizarre bug like V5.1.12 stopping working because the date was 2022

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