Is this news? The article is from Apr 2023
I only received the prompt to subscribe today.
Horrendous how canonical engineers with bills to pay might want to monetise their labour!
More seriously, open source should not be confused with free labour. Do you think Linus works on the kernel for free? He does not, nor should he. We are all lucky to benefit from 5 years free updates from Ubuntu. You need longer, because your use case is so mission critical? then pay for the engineer’s time.
Edit: grammar
Not surprising, they want some of that RHEL money. When you choose a Corporate distribution, enshittification is usually what you get…
You’ll get 5 free instances if you get a subscription, but that kind of messes with the whole “just install Ubuntu from a USB key and use it with no hassle” workflow many Ubuntu users used to love.