It would be very nice if there were FME Server releases (and to a lesser degree, FME Desktop releases, though I realise they're tightly coupled) that received Long Term Support (LTS). As it stands without it, FME isn't really well suited to anything but a very small deployment to an organisation that is trying to follow proper development and system maintenance practices.
Wikipedia has a full definition of LTS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_support), but the short version is - the release doesn't get new features, only bug fixes and security patches.
Examples of software that do it: QGIS, CentOS/RHEL, PostGres, Python, FireFox
Without this, an organisation with a large FME Server install-base that does proper due-diligence on service releases could easily end up spending tens-of-thousands of ($£€) doing acceptance testing just to upgrade FME Server from say 2016.0 to 2016.1 to get the bug-fixes in that next version.
This is necessary because almost anything could have changed between .0 and .1, and if you've ever tried reading the change logs, you'll see a massive amount of changes.
If I report a bug to Safe and am told "Yes, it's fixed in 2016.1", that's great, but a user shouldn't then have to get all the other 2016.1 stuff just to get the fix. That's not how corporate installs of production software work. It should just be able to get the fix.
If however there's an LTS, the patches are considerably smaller and far less testing is required.
Archived
Long Term Support for FME Server
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+1- Contributor
Absolutely! We are running FME Server 2017.1, and having confronted with problems even with the same build number in Desktop (Windows) vs Server (linux), we are really carefully (read = slowly with external expert help) doing our upgrade to 2020.x .... Our developers (some of them non-IT guys) are impatiently taking new Desktop versions into use, and sometimes we have to say that 'Sorry, you have to downgrade your w/s if you want it to server ...' :-(