The Debian Long Term Support team has announced that Debian 6 - a long term support release - will stop receiving updates on February 29, 2016. Debian 6 was first released on February 6, 2011, and saw ten point releases while it was supported by the main nucleus of the Debian community. Since July 19, 2014, maintenance of Debian 6 has been left to the Long Term Support team.
The Long Term Support team was assembled in the months leading up to Debian 6's prior end-of-life date. It is made up of volunteers and companies who want to keep older releases updated for longer. The creation of the group probably had something to do with Debian launching into space. As a result of the LTS team's work, Debian 6 has had the longest lifespan of any release so far.
With the warning about Debian 6's upcoming demise, the LTS team is preparing to transition over to maintaining Debian 7 as its official support is also due to end this month. Maintenance of Debian 7 will continue until May 2018, 5 years after its initial launch.
The LTS release of Debian 6 was limited to i386 and amd64 architectures, it's fairly safe to assume that the same will be true for Debian 7 LTS. Anyone running Debian 7 with any other architectures apart from those supported should move now to Debian 8, to ensure that security updates are still received.
Image via Olimex
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