A Well-Known URI for Software Lifecycle Status

This document defines a Well-Known URI [RFC8615] at which software vendors and open-source maintainers may publish machine-readable lifecycle status information for their products. A JSON resource retrieved from /.well-known/software-status.json allows consumers — including security tools, software composition analysis (SCA) platforms, vulnerability scanners, and system administrators — to programmatically determine whether a specific version of a software product is actively supported, in long-term support (LTS), under security-only maintenance, or at end-of-life (EOL). This revision (-02) extends the schema to support multi-product vendors — organizations that ship multiple distinct products or SKUs under a single domain. A new optional products array at the root of the resource allows a single software-status.json endpoint to serve lifecycle declarations for an entire product catalog, including firmware-based devices such as routers, switches, and IoT appliances. This extension is fully backward compatible: existing single-product resources require no modification. This document also describes, in Appendix B (#appendix-b), a companion convention for open-source projects hosted on version- control platforms to publish equivalent information within the repository at .github/software-status.json.