From the Email bag (email from Jurgen Fischer):
QGIS is a user friendly Open Source Geographic Information System that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows. We are very pleased to announce the release of QGIS 2.14 'Essen'. Essen was the host city to our developer meet ups in October 2012 and 2014. Long Term Release This is a special release since it is designated an 'LTR' (Long Term Release). LTR releases will be supported with backported bug fixes for one year, and will be in permanent feature freeze (i.e. no new features will be added, only bug fixes and trivial updates). Note that we are in discussion to extend the term of our LTR releases to two years, but for technical reasons we will not do this until QGIS 3.2. The purpose of LTR releases is to provide a stable and less frequently changing platform for enterprises and organizations that do not want to deal with updating user skills, training materials etc. more than once per year. The success of the LTR is very much down to you, our beloved users - we need your support to help funding bug fixes and making sure in your support contracts with support providers specify that any bug fixes done on your behalf are applied to the LTR branch as well as our normal development branch. If an LTR is important to you, please consider also directly supporting the QGIS project, or encourage your commercial provider to use LTR as a basis for your enterprise solution so that everyone may benefit from a stable platform that is being continuously improved and refined. Note that for users and organizations that like to live on the frontier, our regular four monthly releases will continue unabated. New Features in QGIS 2.14 'Essen' If you are upgrading from QGIS 2.8 (our previous LTR version) you will find a great many new features in this release. (http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog214/) We encourage you to peruse the changelogs for the intermediate non LTR 2.10 and 2.12 releases as this QGIS 2.14 includes all features published in those releases too. (http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog212/) (http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog210/) Note that 2.14 first enters the regular package repositories and will not immediately replace 2.8 in the LTR package repositories. That will happen when 2.16 is released. Whenever new features are added to software they introduce the possibility of new bugs - if you encounter any problems with this release, please file a ticket on the QGIS Bug Tracker. (http://hub.qgis.org) The source code and binaries for Windows, Debian and Ubuntu are already available via the large download link on our home page: http://qgis.org. More packages will follow as soon as the package maintainers finish their work. Please revisit the page if your platform is not available yet.
