Future release schedule

At ICMC26, Tim Hudson announced a
change
to the OpenSSL Library release schedule for future releases. Last year
we committed to making long term
stable (LTS) releases every two years. Following the release of
4.0, the first major
release since 2018, we now commit to a major release every two years.

So the next LTS will be 4.2 in April 2027 and then we’ll have a major
release, 5.0, in October 2027. That means the final 4.x release will
be supported for the entire 5.x release cycle. This gives significant
flexibility for projects that depend on OpenSSL to decide the
appropriate moment to move to a more recent version of the library.