You can continue to build ZCS for PPC via the public source, there were no technical limitations that forced us to stop shipping pre-built binaries. Once we ship a platform for a major release we like to continue support for that platform throughout the lifecycle of that release. We would like to release a leopard build as soon as possible and do not have the cycles to maintain 3 mac builds along with the other 20 odd platform builds we maintain.
In general Network Edition releases will be supported for the greater of 1 year or 2 major ZCS releases and although unsupported the open source version usually follows. Platforms that we ship only an open source version on typically follow at least the 1 year guideline. We typically support the latest OS builds as demand dictates or as we phase out older OS's. Integrating, updating and compiling third party components is very time consuming across the 20 odd platforms we support so we rarely ship more then 2 versions of any one operating system.
I hope this addresses your concerns, for what it's worth I run my personal email on a PPC mac mini, so I understand your disappointment firsthand. |