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

Wait a little more

[chebucto]

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.

Re:Wait a little more

[swillden]

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.

If you read the information at http://planet.centos.org/, it appears to be a little worse than that.

They say that Davis vanished from the project "some time in 2008". Given that we're more than halfway through 2009, that means he's been gone for the better part of a year, maybe more. Also, they've been asking for quite some time for him to provide a public accounting of the funds collected from contributions to CentOS, and Lance stopped answering their questions months ago. It sounds like they've recently gotten serious about trying to get some answers and discovered that he's completely inaccessible.

It may just be that he's gone on vacation, but given that he's been refusing to answer questions for months about what has happened to what is probably a fairly large amount of money, I think their concern isn't at all unreasonable.

Re:Wait a little more

[dominux]

I have an email from him dated 06/07/09 10:28 relating to some of my domains hosted at uklinux.net that he let expire. Took several months of calls and emails to get a response. Still trying to sort out the situation, one of my domains has been down for about a month :-(

An Alternative

[DesScorp]

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.

More background info at ...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://planet.centos.org/

You can read a bit more there what has happened.

Interesting blog post...

[rallymatte]

From Tim Verhoeven. It explains the issues a little more in depth.
Read the post here.

Is personality driven development part of free?

[tjstork]

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.

Re:medical problems

[BlackFingolfin]

Wait, we are talking about somebody who has "disappeared" a year ago; only he hasn't really disappeared, he occasionally showed up for meetings, making promises, then vanished again (and didn't keep the promises). How would this be explained or justified by a hypothetical medical situation? Even if there was one, then shouldn't he have said months ago "Hey folks, I am in some sort of bad situation, somebody needs to take over my responsibilities while I try to resolve things." ? Nope, I think what they did was very reasonable; although maybe they should have done it a couple months earlier.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

LinkedIn

[dave420]

LinkedIn says he's the founder of CentOS, and that he stopped working there in 2008. Oops.

Re:Peace

[segedunum]

And that's why you should run RH / OEL on mission critical systems. Not trolling, just facing the reality.

Not really. CentOS isn't going to stop working any time soon, the source code and repositories are still around and this will get sorted one way or the other even if it means new domains and changing the name of the project or something or learning from mistakes and setting up some non-profit organisation.

Re:Is This Bus Syndrome?

[bill_mcgonigle]

You do realize that technically Redhat is just skating by on the free give-aways of others, too, don't you?

Redhat puts a ton of work/code into linux and associated projects, they're not merely aggregating.

And, as I understand it, they are happy with the CentOS project. They used to give away Redhat and charge for RHEL. Then they switched to an all-pay model, forked the Fedora project, and CentOS fills the gap that was previously held by Redhat. Sure, there's probably some marginal drain away from paying customers, but there's also a large potential customer base that can 'upgrade' to RHEL very easily.

how is he gone?

[perry753]

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.