Change in supported versions for the Open Social distribution

For a long time Open Social has supported multiple major versions of its distributions. This has helped mitigate some of the challenges sometimes faced for upgrades of major versions of the distribution. However, it has also led to a high burden on the release team, with cherry picks sometimes being difficult to do correctly and ensuring that upgrade paths work from the different versions which may be non-linear, occasionally making upgrades more difficult rather than less difficult and increasing the support burden for everyone involved.

With this support policy we've spent a lot of effort maintaining different versions but were not entirely successful in easing the overall upgrade path for distribution users. With Open Social 13.0.0 we're changing our support strategy and will only support a single version of the distribution at a time, providing a linear upgrade path which is marked by semantic versioning.

We're making this change together with changes to our internal development process around the distribution. This should make it easier for us to experiment with new changes in our SaaS product before moving them into the distribution which will allow us to reduce the need for breaking changes and provide a smoother upgrade path when they do need to occur.

Reducing the amount of time we spend on supporting multiple distribution versions allows us to instead invest that time in providing a smoother experience for staying up to date with the latest distribution version.