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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."
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
http://planet.centos.org/
You can read a bit more there what has happened.
From Tim Verhoeven. It explains the issues a little more in depth.
Read the post here.
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.