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."

Comments

Re:Let's just hope for the best

[nine-times]

This kind of thing really scares me... If the worst has happened, CentOS will be forced to fork their project and start over.

Is that actually scary? I'm far from an expert on this, but isn't CentOS mostly just RHEL repackaged? And isn't the source for CentOS itself available? How hard would it be to fork or start over?

I ask because my first thought was to think, "This must be sarcastic," but then I realized I don't really know what I'm talking about, and there might be some kind of issue I'm not considering.

Data please?

[jbn-o]

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.