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CentOS Project Administrator Goes AWOL
An anonymous reader writes "Lance Davis, the main project administrator for CentOS, a popular free 'rebuild' of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, appears to have gone AWOL. In an open letter from his fellow CentOS developers, they describe the precarious situation the project has been put in. There have been attempts to contact him for some time now, as he's the sole administrator for the centos.org domain, the IRC channels, and apparently, CentOS funds. One can only hope that Lance gets in contact with them and gets things sorted out."
If you read the message in TFA, it kind of seems like a cry for your ex-gf to get back together.
Joking aside, I dont think it's really a surprise for anyone that people have other things to do sometimes, or even getting interested in different stuff. I actually feel sorry for the guy that this got slashdotted and all. If he's on holiday, it's gonna ruin his day. If he's away doing other stuff, he probably dont want to hear his co-admins crying to get him back.
Really, give the guy a peace. I bet he has used serious amount of time on CentOS project and deserves some time off and respect.
He's on vacation with Amy Winehouse. He thinks he's only been there for 4 days.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Maybe he and Alan Cox have eloped?
Did they try the lost+found directory?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Maybe he's hiking in Brazil. Did anyone ever think of that?
He probably took the money and ran.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Has anyone checked to see if he's hiking in the Applicaiha?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
This kind of thing really scares me, because this is exactly what it happens when someone dies, for example: the data/information stream coming from them on the web simply ceases to exist. Also, this is one of the main reasons why important projects should have their main assets handled by a group of people, and not have things centralized. If the worst has happened, CentOS will be forced to fork their project and start over.
But let's just hope I'm spewing bullshit and he's just pissed off.
This sort of open letter should really be a last-resort kind of thing, but their letter says
When I (Russ) try to call the phone numbers for UK Linux, and for you individually, I get a telco intercept 'Lines are temporarily busy' for the last two weeks. Finally yesterday, a voicemail in your voice picked up, and I left a message urgently requesting a reply.
If they left a vm yesterday, they should give it at least until Monday before publicly humiliating the guy. Being a few days late in answering voiemail isn't odd at all. Also, is it out of the question to try and get someone to check his house personally? A team of 10 people have got to know someone in the UK.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
"as he's the sole administrator for the centos.org domain, the IRC channels, and apparently, CentOS funds"
That's a lot of responsibility for a single person. What would happen if, for example, he were to be hit by a bus one day?
I think this was a major argument Microsoft once had against open source projects: that the maintainer or whoever could just get up and leave it one day, because they got bored and decided to move on. There again, I guess that's true of real life jobs too. And, whilst it's possible for someone else to take over the role, the transition of knowledge and bringing said replacement up to speed wouldn't be an overnight thing.
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
As someone who recently had medical problems that sprung up over night, I can honestly say that there could be other reasons he's not responding. I guess an open letter is as good a way as any to try to get in touch with him, but the tone of the letter is beyond ignorant. It's more accusatory than anything (which may be justified), but it's certainly not a sign of professionalism. If anything, it shows that he may have been correct in managing the project without the petulant "help" of the other developers.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
I know you're just trolling, but i'll explain it. the problem is bus distance, which could be a problem on any project.
the thing you should find extraordinary and really shows how powerful free software is, is that a single person can reuse code to make a project as large as this. this would be unthinkable in the non-free world where you seem to need an army of programmers and lawyers to make the simplest program.
You can't even guarantee that a major project isn't just going to stop without notice
CentosOS will never die. Ultimately I will fork it and continue it. That's the guarantee you have for good projects.
They have access to the source code of the distribution, don't they ?
The only "failure" here is that the domain name, the IRC channel, and the funds are unavailable. The project itself can still continue.
And this kind of incident is very uncommon anyway - most of the time if a maintainer doesn't want to work on a project anymore he'll just pass on the information needed to continue to a new maintainer.
Copying is seldom a good business plan in the long run
They see me trollin'...
BUT, I will respond anyway.
This is not a failure of open source, it is a failure of redundancy. We've learned this lesson countless times: There should never be "only one" person with protected access to a project. It's like kusanagi374 said above.
There's a danger when one guy has complete control of the project. Not even Linus has that. If the guy bolts or drops dead, you're left in limbo.
If you need a similar compatible version of RH Enterprise Linux, I'd suggest Scientific Linux. It's made by the staff at Fermi Labs (and CERN as well) as a uniform OS platform for all their experiments, and is basically RHEL compiled from source. Like RHEL, it can also be used as a general purpose OS (it just includes a lot of science packages, especially stuff for physics). It's supposed to be 100% compatible, or very very close, and the Fermi guys distribute the ISO's online.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
As opposed to with closed source projects, where when someone walks away with all the passwords everything's just fucking fine and peachy, right?
Hans Reiser, currently serving time in federal prison, only had this to say: "I told you. He went to Russia!"
My blog
...or Argentina? I hear the women are switched on by men who go AWOL there.
He's just spending time with his soul mate in Argentina.
I like CentOS a lot, but still
It's open source, if anything goes _really_ wrong, fork. The source is there, all references to the "Proeminent Linux vendor" properly stripped, etc
It's less work than start from scratch again from the "proeminent linux vendor"
how long until
What has this got to do with open-source or not ?
Your argument is about having a contractual relation with a supplier. You can have such contracts for open source software (from, say, RedHat, IBM or Oracle), and there are plenty of examples of closed-source, but freely available software packages offered by volunteers.
Most proprietary software also comes with end-user license agreements which basically state that the developer has no obligation to the users of said software.
I dont think the issue is that he has left, went on vacation, had an emergency. The issue is that due to his apparent need to have all the power there is no one else that can administer the project, thereby leaving it dead in the water.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
But the same thing can happen with any small company with closed source as well.
To repeat the old saying "at least with FOSS you have the source".
I find this really upsetting. Frankly CentOS is of the best distros out there. It has a very long life and really is ideal for servers. It is basically the free as in beer version of RedHat.
Every time I see an idiot running a server on Fedora I wonder why not CentOS. Now they actually have a good reason to not use CentOS unless this gets fixed.
I guess it is time to look hard at Ubuntu Server.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
My first server was a boxed copy of Red Hat 5.2 that I bought for $300. It has the export-restricted SSL (pre-Clinton liberalization of encryption).
Around Fedora Core 3 I switched to CentOS for my servers.
However, I've been worried about how out-of-date CentOS currently is, basically a snapshot of FC6.
Yum keeps a box up-to-date with security back-patched code that is 2 or 3 versions out of date. Try to get a F4180 printer to work under the old CUPS. Try it.
So guys like me use CentOS but then in order to have the most recent versions of MySQL and PHP, we compile everything from source. This is a problem because we then only patch for security every 6 months or when we think of it (or when there's a big scary headline on Slashdot).
After switching my laptop to ubuntu, I discovered that the environment is now as deep as I need it to be. I was able to replicate my entire environment, including email and dns, on ubuntu, either with source or with apt-get .deb files.
So although I grew up a Red Hat man, I'm forced to consder Ubuntu for the next server. More worrying, when I ran the idea by my colleaugues they were open to the idea.
So get your whois registration and bank account sorted out, by all means.
And then hope that Red Hat releases a version of RHEL RSN based on Fedora 11.
CentosOS will never die. Ultimately I will fork it and continue it. That's the guarantee you have for good projects.
I don't think you understand what CentOS is about. The idea is that it mirrors the exact same source code contained in various Red Hat distributions, made available with free "community" support instead of expensive paid support from RHT. A fork would be devastating because customers wouldn't have the same confidence that the code was as thoroughly vetted as a Red Hat release.
You know who else went AWOL to Argentina? /sorry, too easy to invoke Godwin's Law here
That's an excellent simple example of the advantages of Free Software:
Free Software X lost its developer/manager/whatever -> anyone can step in and replace him, or pay someone to do it.
Company Y decides to stop supporting its proprietary software Z -> you're screwed in the ass, big time.
Don't count on "stopping without notice"... from these kind of adverse situations that interesting new stuff emerges.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
http://planet.centos.org/
You can read a bit more there what has happened.
One of the other key developers, Karanbir Singh, disappeared (albeit for a very legit reason...he got married and had the gall to go on a honeymoon ) at a very inconvenient time during which a version update was to be released earlier this year. The remaining developers either wouldn't or couldn't complete the process in his absence....the end result being a significant delay in the CentOS 5.2-->5.3 upgrade process.
I have been an active user of CentOS since version 3 (back in 2004) and it would really pain me to see such a great project fall on hard times or disband/fork. Enough of my production machines are running on CentOS that this latest strangeness has got me seriously evaluating Ubuntu's server product for low budget applications and convincing other deeper pocketed clients to consider reverting back to RHEL.
Here's hoping they manage to sort things out and come up with a more evenly distributed model for project responsibility.
Yeah, he probably died and no one, not even his wife, knew that he was a closet Linux Geek. They'll be going over his record, find the accounts, and she'll be crying "Oh my God, I never knew. Why didn't he tell me?!?! We could have worked on it TOGETHER!" Only then you realize that his wife was a closet Linux Developer, and actually responsible for a great deal of OS content.
It'd be be like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but really nerdy.
How can you guarantee a closed source package or project isn't going to stop without notice, hmm?
And how many commercial software companies feel "no obligation to the project or its users."
Seems to me I've gotten bit more by commercial companies not maintaining their product than open source projects suddenly dieing. At least the source code is available for the latter.
Yes. You are right. It's impossible to go trough an incident like this without lost of credibility. But ultimately, if the project is good enough, and the motivation to continue also, the credibility will be restored.
Exactly 66% of the four CentOS users are affected.
We have the same problem where I work at the moment. One of our irreplaceable developers has been missing for over a week. The only difference with an open source project is that "customers" know. Our customers don't know anything.
Are you sure he didn't just go to AOL and can't get any email out?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
you mean like all the people with PPC macs who want to upgrade to snow leopard.......
it happens in hardware too.....
it's not a open source/closed source argument.
like you stated it happens everywhere.
I'm serious. If he was depressed it may be a possibility. :(
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
This is probably redundant but I cant help it. Has anyone checked to see if he is hiking in the Andriondaks?
Follow The Money.
At first when I was reading the story, I was all like, "oh, guy with only keys to kingom hit by a bus?", then I saw how he controlled the funds and I was all like "he's so on a beach in the tropics threatening to burn the hotel down if he doesn't get his paper umbrella".
Seriously though, I hope it's simply a case of needing a break, not something more ominous. I like CentOS, and I'd hate to see the project fall apart due to losing one key person.
The Digital Sorceress
Since yesterday... Met him here in Amsterdam in a hookerbar. He kept me clean of tabs all night! Nice fellow, he said he could spare some cents.
From Tim Verhoeven. It explains the issues a little more in depth.
Read the post here.
Maybe he is off hiking the Appalachian Trail or breaking up with an Argentinian woman?
This guy wasn't a Russian mail order bride, was he? If so, we'd better start looking for plots of freshly turned earth.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
OMG, you guys hired Soandso. He was with our company. He knocked up 3 admin assistants, and the guy that fixes the copier. He peed in the coffee pot in the break room. As a joke, he put our proprietary code up for sale on Craig's List. The worst of it was when he used 3 months of petty cash and donated it to McCain/Palin 2008.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Probably not gonna be considering CentOS for anymore projects. But the Debian based stuff always works out; so far for me anyways.
It seems that as of late, there has been a lot of public controversy around various FOSS projects and the people that run them. There's disputes between key players followed up, all too frequently, with giant personal missives about how this or that person isn't going to work on this project anymore because somebody else is too mean to them. There's guys disappearing, flame wars, all sorts of very public problems with projects. One wonders if FOSS is becoming too much of a soap opera and less of a collaborative development model. These aren't unimportant projects either. The GCC compiler, X Windows system and its underpinnings, the kernel, and certainly file systems, all have had some very famous and public spats between various egos.
The one thing that money does, when developers actually get paid for their work, is that it forces people to put aside their differences. When there's no cash on the table, there's no logical reason for someone to take a pounding personally due to a personality conflict. But, when there is cash, people can accept quite a bit of abuse and still produce something. While personal glory is nice to have, its not nearly so nice as a check. But, in FOSS, if you take away that personal glory, there's really no incentive at all. You almost have to wonder if, personality driven politics will continue to undermine FOSS, and how much personality FOSS can stand before the whole brand is so polluted by public conflict that one would almost prefer to just write somebody a check just to avoid the soap opera.
This is my sig.
AWOL is Absent Without Leave.
Is he REALLY supposed to ask permission from the CentOS people before going somewhere?
Missing would be a much better term to use.
No better argument for paid support than news like this. Fortune 500 companies don't suddenly stop answering the phone.
Not that CentOS isn't a boon to RHT. But you can bet quite a few IT managers are having some heart burn this morning.
Have you checked Argentina yet? I hear its nice down there this time of year.
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He's English. It's late July, early August. He's probably just on "holiday" (it is the custom in most of Europe to take an extended vacation around this time.) Breathe deeply and wait a bit.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Maybe we shoud all start thinking about storing our passwords and stuff somewhere. For when something happens, someone else can take over.
This is unfortunate as I really enjoy using CentOS on my servers and don't feel like moving to another distro. I really hope he comes back and straightens everything out so this awesome project does not die.
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Appalachian Cent(OS).
http://www.museumsusa.org/museums/info/1164138/
Depends on which issue of 2600. He'll be lounging on a yacht soon enough if he got issuWOU()*S&DF(AO)@#$(*S - NO CARRIER
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Seriously?
The whole point of "getting away from it all" is GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL. I haven't taken a formal two-week vacation in way too long but the last time I did, as well as every other time I've gotten away for a long weekend or so, my laptop is turned off and left behind, the cell phone is with me but turned off, and I'm *completely* out of reach. I have no idea what's happening at my job, with my friends, or with my family. They have no idea what's up with me. And that's the way I like it.
Why on earth would someone go to the trouble of scheduling time off and, say, taking a trip, all theoretically for the purposes of clearing and refreshing the mind...and then ruin it by keeping in touch so that the mind can never fully disengage and recharge?
I just don't get it.
Hi,
i don't think that this an atypical problem, neither inside or outside the
open source community. We have people giving ressources of to projects
(e.g. time, money). Usually they expect something in return (e.g. recognition,
influence). Normally those expectations are never stated explecitely. So what
happens: Someone sees his expectations not met, so he cuts the ressources he
gives. Usually this goes together with hurt feelings as well, so he tries to
get a refund by keeping assets (domains, money, passwords, etc.).
Same thing happened with other OSS projects (e.g. Blastwave) and non
profit organisations (e.g. Hannelore Kohl Stiftung here in germany).
You cannot fix this. When you try to fix it, you need a board and a charta
right at the beginning. Too many projects would already die here and would
never get to the stage where a quitting founder brings a crisis. In the worst
case now: they have to start at the current status again under a new name.
CU, Martin
P.S. This shell not be a factual description, what happened in this project.
This is only a description of things i observed elsewhere and would expect
to find here too.
Gotta be a record for a chair throw, even for someone with so much practice.
You mean that of all the 'geeks' that are working on this 'project', no one can take over the IRC channel and domain name? Its pretty trivial to do both, even today, with all the 'safe gaurds' in place. I haven't tried to steal a bank account but that seems pretty trivial as well.
So tell me exactly why this is a problem for a bunch of geeks?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
He told his wife he had to fly out, to meet the other CentOS developers... in Buenos Aires...
I'd be worried too:
Domain ID:D103409469-LROR
Domain Name:CENTOS.ORG
Created On:04-Dec-2003 12:28:30 UTC
Last Updated On:15-Jul-2009 21:54:30 UTC
Expiration Date:04-Dec-2009 12:28:30 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Tucows Inc. (R11-LROR)
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT UPDATE PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:tutBz5Gni1LW5TtF
Registrant Name:contactprivacy.com
Registrant Organization:Contactprivacy.com
Registrant Street1:96 Mowat Ave
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Toronto
Registrant State/Province:ON
Registrant Postal Code:M6K3M1
Registrant Country:CA
Registrant Phone:+1.4165385457
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:centos.org@contactprivacy.com
This can happen if you have a distribution based distribution where the original distribution is not happy to help. That can become a problem.
Making an openSUSE or SLE based distribution will be much easier to do. This with both the openSUSE Build Service and SUSE Studio
The most work will be in removing the trademarks for which they have developed rembrand
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It is summer time, and like the rest of europe, he is probably on vacation somewhere. Maybe Ibiza. No need to panic until september when people start thinking about getting back to work.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
This is actually an interesting point. This could be a case of 'bus syndrome'. What happens to a critical project when only one person has all the knowledge, but gets hit and killed by a bus on the way to work? After we find out whether he put on clean underwear like his mother told him, the project gets hit by the same bus. The project might be a little more resilient but it still gets seriously hurt.
I don't have any sympathy for anyone involved with a project where this happens. It is so preventable. As time has gone on, I have been getting more vocal in work situations when I see this kind of thing happening. It's a pain in the ass when the Asperger King or Queen decides to leave because they don't like to share. And half the time they don't use any sort of recognizable organizational structure to what they do, so it takes longer for others to figure what's there, which makes a bad situation even worse.
I hope the guy wasn't hit by a bus, or hurt in any way. In any case, this should be an eye opener for the other members of the project and any people who rely on CentOS for critical systems. To throw gas on the fire, I think it is also a good reason to go with a 'for profit' company like Red Hat, Ubuntu (Canonical), or Suse if you need to use an OS for mission critical systems (or even their pressure cooker products). A for profit company has a lot more incentive to make sure these kinds of issues don't happen, and the resources to make sure these kinds of issues don't happen.
I personally won't use software produced by projects like CentOS. My belief is that projects like CentOS are there because people want to skate on the backs of people and companies who have spent time and money making a good product, just because they don't want to pay for that hard work. I believe this is the flaw in the GNU license, and not open source in general. It is like stealing money from those who created the original work. Redhat spends a lot of money to develop their product, and others just copy it and give it away for free. I think the idea of open source was to be able to modify drivers and software so that it better meets your needs. I don't think it was so you could take other people's ideas and sell them as your own. If Redhat were just starting and were still on the edge of financial stability, and a 'CentOS' product started giving away Redhat's product for free, the for profit company could fail. We periodically see companies trying to make open source products switch to closed source for this very reason. The service support paradigm only works for products that are too big and complicated for the 'little guy' to take on. And even then it is a risky proposition until the code base is reasonably stable, since the time and money going into stabilizing the code can outweigh the money coming in from sales and support work. Even CentOS and others like it rely on Redhat to fix bugs and copy those updates too. While legal, I think it is morally wrong. As a note, every couple of years I will go out and purchase a copy of a Linux distribution. We all rely on them to create our Linux installs. How many out there who spout all the GNU propaganda actually try to contribute this way so that these distributions are able to continue? While some may contribute code, which I believe counts for just as much as contributing financially, I really doubt that more than an extremely small handful of people even do this for the distros. Most just want the free as in beer software and feel like they're cool because they aren't using MS or Apple. Yes I am getting more cynical as I get older... and I was pretty damned cynical when I was young. :)
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Unlikly to happen if you go with the paid option. Big companies like MS, Apple, Oracle, etc. have (or should have) various checks in place so a single employee can't take the source with them.
Wow. Imagine all those whiz kids who told their bosses they'd save mad money changing RHEL to CentOS.
This reminds me of the Xircon IRC chat client software from a few years ago.
Sometimes people just pull the plug, I guess.
Kriston
Couple of grand?
Well it's all volunteer anyway and if someone else wants to take over and make a CentrOS (note the R) even if it's to take a couple of grand after a few years work, then fair play to them.
It's not as if he's going to be getting his hands on millions, is it.
Says in his profile that he's working for microsoft.
I wonder how they got to him.
You know, I can see the CentOS project is having a lot of problems right now; yum update doesn't work right now without some manual babysitting. There are some issues with circular Python dependencies and Bind dependencies; I was able to resolve them by removing the Bind packages by hand, and updating them with "yum install bind" "yum install bind-libs", etc. Fixing the Python issue was more tricky; I manually downloaded the updated Python packages and then used "rpm --upgrade" to update them.
I've seen a lot of Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones come and go (Tao Linux, Pie Box Enterprise Linux, Lineox, X/OS Linux, White Box Enterprise Linux); it looks like the mechanics of a volunteer project aren't best suited for this type of clone distribution.
CentOS is good because it has been around a while, but with the issues we had with the 5.3 update and the issues the project is having now with its leader, it might be better to move on to Scientific Linux. If things don't change with CentOS, I'll probably make the CentOS -> Scientific Linux switch when RHEL 6 comes out and Scientific Linux makes their RHEL 6 clone.
I remember when i was in a robotic competition our coach/teacher used to ask us to write down our mother's phone number if in case we went MIA in disney world, may be these open source projects should do the same.
I know CentOS is a RHEL rebuild, but I've looked a few times on the website and never found the source for the build environment.
I mean they must have something like a wget routine that mirrors the SRPM's, then something that greps for all the RedHat references and replaces them in the SPEC files, then compiles all the RPM's.
So where is this - in a GIT/SVN repo somewhere?
Say for example, we wanted to fork CentOS or back it up in case the project goes titsup or someone goes AWOL/honeymoon for a few weeks [again]?
#include <sig.h>
I was all like, "The Project lead is just going to take the money and skip town" but my boss was all like "CentOS is too big to fail."
While i agree to an extent, a person in charge of a major project has some responsibly to at least say 'f-you I'm outta here'.
No, no laws say that, but just a tad bit of human courtesy should demand it. It only takes a second.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This could be pretty damaging to CentOS. I run an open source project... if the guy that started it and keeps it on course leaves, the project can suffer a lot.
I like CentOS, many of our customers prefer it as a free alternative to RedHat. I hope the lead of CentOS is fine.
Cheers,
E. Conde
Lead Developer
jBilling.com - Open Source Billing
TBH i wouldnt be suprised if it went something a little like this,
He went to Mexico, he now has swineflu.
OR.
He suddenenly not accidently the money.
LinkedIn says he's the founder of CentOS, and that he stopped working there in 2008. Oops.
We asked for that patch months ago. You guys blew us off, so we kidnapped Joe Dawson and have him in our dungeon writing that patch as we whip him on your behalf. ;-)
in all reality, that's happened here as well, most notable incident was when we had a round of layoffs. One HR Dept. was in charge of "golden handshakes" and another was in charge of eliminating redundancies. Apparently they didn't communicate all that well as our senior developer took the cash buy out and ran, while the only other dev was laid off. It took almost a month before the company realized that they had done gone fucked up. By then the senior dev was incommunicado, never to be seen again, and the jr. dev (me) had accepted a position at another company, in a completely different discipline (hardware rather than software work), and was unimpressed by the offer of having my old job back.
I presented them with two options (neither was over the top IMHO): $100K/yr as senior dev with a 2 year minimum contract, or a pay to play per job contract at $125/hr for on-site work and $0.20/LOC for software work, comments included in the line count, but single open/close curlies and blank lines not counted. Entire codebase counted (so ~$2500 per compile).
Each new build ordered would include 4 hours of on-site support, and unlimited bug fixes + 2 ECOs for where I coded to the DOCs but the part didn't like it for some reason.
This codebase was for a piece of test equipment that was developed in-house, so no external vendor can support it. Last I heard my old manager was dusting off his C skills and the code changes he put in worked, but they had "issues".
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
You'll just have to eat the off-topic mod.
Lance Davis, the first editor of Centos, who never actually resigned from his job. He simply left one morning for lunch and never returned to his office, making all later holders of the position "Acting Editors." His old office is still preserved by the Centos volunteers in the hope that he will return. His desk sports a sign that reads "Missing, presumed fed."
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Our company is in the middle of moving our server architecture from Ubuntu to CentOS. If this news has any chance of delaying the delivery of periodical and important software updates then I think it might be wise of us to reconsider our OS choice. What do you think?
CentOS has 0.64 of a user? and 0.36 of a user seperate?
Are we talking unreasonably sharp install media here?
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is because many people who were paying RedHat for their support didn't feel like they were getting anything close to value for money.
In particular, bugs reported by users often made their way to bulletin boards, where they were seen by the people who reported the bugs in the first place, and not resolved by RedHat. Nor did RedHat leverage their network of developers and contributors, to fix those bugs in a timely fashion.
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Jerry Taylor's memory is very long. And he has powerful, powerful friends.
I'm just saying.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
The Angels have the administrator.
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
I agree with you, Redhat are a bunch of evil thiefs, taking all that work Linus did and trying to make a buck off it! Skating on the back of all the time and money he's spend developing the kernel, just because they dont want to pay for that hard work. It is like stealing money from those whe created the original kernel! I dont think you should be able to take other people's ideas and sell them as your own. If Linus was just starting and on the edge of financial stablility, and a "Linux Kernel" product started giving away Linus' product for free, he'd be forced to go out of business! While this is legal, I think it is mortally wrong.
The reasosn i can imagine are
0) He had the urge to go to Bejing by the trans-Siberian railway.
1) He took the money an ran
2) He has a small business/large personal spending, mixed up the accounts, his business lost money and at some point there was no cover-up possible
3) he had a heart attack or another bad medical condition and is lying unconsciously in the Hospital.
4) He has psychological problems (e.g. depression)
5) He got father and forgot to tell the others
6) He killed himself
7) He got hit by a truck (or died unexpectedly in another way)
Lets see in which cases the letter helps: *maybe* 5
Lets see in which cases the letter makeas a constructive solution less probable: 1,2,4
Lets see the cases in which it does not matter: 0,3,6,7
To give up the chances to negotiate sth for the personally understandable urge to write a open embarrassing letter to somebody it *stupid*. I understand that the guys are pissed, but this wont help, and, most likely, hurt. I dont know which case it is, in my professional life and as member of some voluntary organizations i already was confronted with cases 0-6. And from that experience i would say, normally you can correct 0,2-6 constructively and *maybe* even 1, but after such a letter that is reduce to 5
Face it boys and girls, he finally installed windows 7, fell in love with it, and dumped linux! +1 M$soft, -1 Linux
... this isn't a Reiser-style case...
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See above where it is pointed out that he has already been missing for at least seven months.
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This story is fucking priceless.
I've been using OSS for the past 15 years, and am primarily focused on it still. This is a large reason for companies being leery of using OSS for critical components.
It certainly is a situation that applies to all projects - many companies have single points of knowledge and put the business at a high degree of risk.
However when your entire OS structure is at risk it's a Big Deal. The points in the letter should have been long addressed before people could reasonably trust the software.
This should be taken as a learning experience for those that don't think in terms of single points of failure.
Hopefully everything works out and ownership is transferred cleanly..
I bet he's just hiking the Appalachian Trail, then visiting his mistress in South America. He'll be back soon.
Man - if I had *any* pull within RH, I'd be screaming that we need to release some sort of a cross-grade app to pull in the CentOS users NOW. Give them a few months of free support for their trouble.
Register new domain in said name. ...break your promise of providing updates for n number of years.
CentOS has brand recognition, a reputation, and promises to keep.
That said, they can probably recover from losing any money that's been embezzled, it's the domain name that's the key issue. And it was switched to private registration just a couple months ago.
The solution probably lies in meatspace. Who's on the CentOS UK Brute-squad SIG?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
First, I run several CentOS servers. The nature of the core structure to mirroring RH distro, does not make me very concerned that somehow this is the end of CentOS. It is a fairly trivial task for someone to fork this projects (just buy a frigen new domain name), and carry on as before.
It does however bring up a increasingly greater problem of amateurs in the FOSS projects because of the increased popularity. I have recently found this out the hard way when the PClinuxos distro project blew apart. I encountered people telling me (with my own very limited experience related to distros and rpms) that I should for example take over running a 64 bit version, and not to worry about it because they had no experience either and where running a distro project. Which right there made me drop any wish to use it in the future for anything important. I have been using linux for over 8 years, but would never assume I am qualified to run a public distro project. In the case of PCLos it is showing obviously in ever increasing instabilities, infighting, delays, and so on in the project. This is just one case off the top of my head among FOSS recently.
This is not the first project to have the amateurs take over, but across the board you see more and more new users getting involved in FOSS projects. That is both a blessing and curse. The problem is those with experience and talent that keep those people in check, are getting spread thinner and thinner. Just look at the explosion of distros in the last few years. Everyone and their brother now can run their own distro.
So how do we insure quality and stability in FOSS without killing the open spirit and innovation?
Living in Chile
And NOW they are starting to complain?
Apparently Davis was last seen 12 months ago, in contact with developers.
NOW they are complaining he is "missing".
Does anyone for a moment believe that?
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
If I'm going to donate money to an Open Source project, I prefer that it be run by a Non-profit, and that I am donating to the non-profit. Why? If I just donate to Joe open-source maintainer, I've given the money to him, and he can do whatever with it. Maybe he gets a lot of donations to the project, but then just takes the money and buys a big screen TV, abandoning the project. In that case, I don't think he's actually broken any laws (perhaps you could argue that there was some sort of implied/verbal contract, or maybe you could possibly get him for false advertising, but in the end, you gave him the money, and it's his).
If, on the other hand, you donate to a non-profit, and someone who is an officer of the non-profit abuses his position and takes the money to buy himself a big-screen TV (assuming that the board of the non-profit didn't authorize some sort of payment/wage for the developer, of course), that officer is now a Felon (embezzlement). So, a non-profit can provide a certain level of oversight for how funds are used, and the project 'lead' can't just take the money and run.
Note: I'm not saying Open Source developers shouldn't be paid. Of course, the funds donated to a non-profit might very validly be used to either pay wages to the developers, or pay them on a code-completed basis (i.e., when you deliver working code that implements such-and-such functionality, you will be payed $1000 for the work completed). But the point is, the money in that case is definitely being used by the non-profit for the development of the project in a verifiable and responsible way.
heheh - if this is still an issue in October, I can only imagine the angry horde in front of their booth. http://www.cpanel.net/2009/06/centos-is-exhibiting-at-cpanel-conference-2009.html
Seriously.. no joke.. The day I decide to try CentOS for the first time because I want to get that Redhat Enterprise experience, this happens!
Dude is off building boats with Andy and Red...
Informative, +1
I love the CentOS project and what it represents. If someone wanted an Enterprise level Linux for a web server and didn't have the funds to pay for Red Hat, this was a wonderful solution. If you are a major company, pay for Red Hat but if you are a small company, self-employed, there is nothing wrong with open source and free. You don't complain about MySQL users getting that for free. You don't complain that you develop in Eclipse and JavaBeans for free. PHP development etc. So why do you guys think Linux should cost money? Okay, they mismanaged things and one guy had it all. The people who really lose out are the ones who donated their time and money via Paypal to help the project. But as a CentOS user, okay, I change the repo setting to the new site and keep rocking.
If you are hosting stuff at uklinux then it may be the latter.
Like "American Way Of Life"?
Unless that corporation is Wal-Mart and you need assistance with your DRM-riddled audio tracks. Or that corporation is Major League Baseball and you want continuous reliable service for your DRM-riddled videos (for which you pay a subscription fee). Or Apple and you dared to "upgrade" your iPod one too many times (in Apple's view) and Apple won't cooperate by restoring the tracks you paid for (and their software deleted). Or...
If you want reliability you want DRM-free media you can play/transcode as you need, and you need insulation from any single source of support. That insulation comes from the freedoms of free software. CentOS might be forked into something compatible one can transition into later because people with the technical skill and time to deliver a new compatible GNU/Linux distribution.
Digital Citizen
Things can suddenly go very wrong. I lost a frequent contributor to one of my projects earlier this year... he apparently passed away within hours of going to the hospital to complain about a backache. The backache was spinal cancer.
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What is it about CentOS that makes it so important? I don't really understand what is so important about a repackaged redhat distribution. Maybe someone could educate me.
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Move away to what, exactly?
Scientific linux. Upstream compatible and put together by Fermilab, CERN and others.
You need to RTFA a little better.
"Lance vanished from the project some time in 2008. Everybody needs time off from projects from time to time, so there was no real need to worry about that. What there was to worry about is the following: Lance is the only one, who can make active changes to the centos.org domain, as he âoeowns itâ. Nobody else in the team is able to add nameservers, for instance. Recently he put an anonymizing service on the domain, so that nobody from the outside can see who that domain belongs to. "
Obsessive perhaps, but it hasnt been without a positive reward.
We run a few high profile servers scattered around the country, not just for TF2, we need people on call 24/7 to deal with server problems, hacking/DDOS attacks, social problems, network problems, backend database problems, that kind of thing. And unlike CentOS, having one guy in a certain role has proven to be a surefire path to failure, So we have DR plans of "In case X fails, contact A here, then here, then contact B here, then C here and here." At least three people are capable of performing any specific task, in scattered timezones and countries one should be up. The only thing which isn't as distributed as we would like is some of our source code is only truly understood by the original coder and one of the physical pieces of hardware is only accessible by one person as it finds itself in a university datacenter on a very fat pipe.
And to the guy below me, it sounds like you need a DR planner, I should get you my card ;) .
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A more in-depth blog post from one of the authors can be found here: http://misterd77.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-is-up-with-centos-project.html
Things sound pretty shady...
The leader of a distribution bearing an eight-pointed start goes missing.
Seduced by the dark Chaos gods, no doubt.
Expect battle barges and daemons inbound to RHEL HQ any moment now. :p
says the 1 beos user.
neither of us made sense, so.. what?
Call the inevitable fork 2CentOS, just my 2CentOS.
how is he gone? He is clearly on IRC right now * [lancelan] (n=lance@uklinux.plus.com): Lance Davis * [lancelan] @#centos-devel @#uklinux @#lbw @#centos @#centos-mirror #centos-social @#lance * [lancelan] irc.freenode.net :http://freenode.net/
* [lancelan] is identified to services
* [lancelan] is signed on as account lance_cen
* [lancelan] idle 01:47:07, signon: Thu Jul 30 19:55:01
* [lancelan] End of WHOIS list.
Record last updated on 30-Jul-2009 I haven't paid for the renewal (but I am willing to if he will just put the charge on my account) or had any contact with him, but it just came back. fwiw the domain in question is the rather excellent http://www.astoryforbedtime.com/ which is all about sharing audio readings of bedtime stories. Kind of an audio YouTube for parents, but with a real business model (commission from Amazon on book sales). It has been up for a couple of years, when I get to £10 Amazon will send me a check. I think I need to get better at the dark arts of marketing stuff.
Enterprise class means that you have a dedicated team of people that are experts and can troubleshoot problems for you.
You don't understand how important this is until you have users losing millions per hour and you have got to fix something that is broken...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You are doing so well outlining why it is important to have commercial support, and then, unexpectedly, embarrass yourself with your incoherent rant about the GPL (not GNU) license.
How can we drill in the skull of people spouting this "argument" that if somebody (company, individual, whatever) decides to use the GPL, then nobody can claim they are being "robbed" of anything if somebody else becomes rich using that same code?
Or do you think that somebody donating something for a charity shop and then walking to the police station to report he has been robed is actually sane?
As for paying for Linux CDs, good for you, but again, the people creating and releasing distros are fully aware that most people will never pay a dime for them, so your "defense" of their rights is frankly laughable and pointless.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... you just say "goodbye, see you in two weeks time".
Any company were somebody needs to be disturbed during a holiday is not being well run....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have one phone for work, one for my regular life.
People in my contacts list rarely find their way in both phones.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I can't believe they would be that clueless.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The notice is very emotionally charged and very confrontational. To me, the tone communicates that the author, Russ Herrold, is not interested in reconciliation.
He uses phrases such as "You seem to have crawled into a hole ... and this is not acceptable." and "Please contact me, or any other signer of this letter at once, to arrange for the required information to keep the project alive at the 'centos.org' domain." These sound insulting and threatening.
He also throws around words such as "fear" and "kill." These are very emotionally charged words.
I don't know any of the details or background other than the notice, but the attacking wording sounds more like a blackmail, extortion, or coup attempt than a legitimate plea to find the project leader.
There's a nice little update on the front page of http://www.centos.org/ clarifying the situation a bit. Here's the relevant text from the sidebar:
1. Found open-source project
2. Set up donation page with all funds going to your own personal account, while building up a community and admins
4. go AWOL
4. Profit!
From the Centos.org home page:
Note: The CentOS Development team had a normal meeting today and Lance Davis was in attendance. In the meeting a majority of issues were resolved right away and a working agreement was reached with deadlines for any unresolved issues. There should be no impact to any CentOS users moving forward.
The CentOS project is now in control of the CentOS,org and CentOS.info domains and owns all trademarks, materials and artwork in the CentOS distributions.
We look forward to working with Lance quickly to complete all the agreed upon issues.
More information should follow very early next week.
No data, no cry
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