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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.
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!
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.
"as he's the sole administrator for the centos.org domain, the IRC channels, and apparently, CentOS funds"
Does anyone know about his personal financial situation? It is not unknown for people to borrow against their business or organization to fix personal financial problems with a "promise" to pay it back "when things get better". Since he has not provided any financial statements from the organization, I'm leaning towards this.
As opposed to with closed source projects, where when someone walks away with all the passwords everything's just fucking fine and peachy, right?
Maybe he *was* hit by a bus.
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
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
"give it at least until Monday before publicly humiliating the guy."
Except they had been calling for 2 weeks to nothing but a busy signal, which alone might be sufficient cause for such an open letter, especially considering the financial and management concerns.
Oh, and nobody goes on holiday without contact for over 24 hours, do they? I bring a laptop and a smartphone with me wherever I go. Even when I visited Northern Africa, I made sure to get online at least once a day to check, act on, and reply to my email.
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.
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
Just one word came to mind when I read the blurb on the CentOS front page: unprofessional. Seeing a message like that on the site of the developer of my operating system would scare the crap out of me. Commercial software packages go on hiatus sometimes, nobody knows why, but at least they (AFAIK) don't scare their user base away by making a very public announcement about an individual teammate.
Oh, and nobody goes on holiday without contact for over 24 hours, do they? I bring a laptop and a smartphone with me wherever I go. Even when I visited Northern Africa, I made sure to get online at least once a day to check, act on, and reply to my email.
Its not a vacation if you can find me.
I leave my cell, laptop, etc home. For my last trip, I told my co-workers what park I would be in and that if something went south that they can call the park ranger and then hope that they can find me.
I want to get away from the the regular grind, not bring them with me :-)
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.
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.
it forces people to put aside their differences
tjstork, meet office politics!
when there is cash, people can accept quite a bit of abuse and still produce something.
Oh, you've already met! Taking abuse is not "putting aside your differences" it's "desperation for the next paycheck in this economy". The only thing unique in what transpired between Linus and Alan was the public nature of it. People get chewed out for things they feel were unfair all of the time, and sometimes they even quit over it.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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
Where to begin. . . on commercial projects, *I'm sure* that there are problems with developers all the time. They leave, they get fired, whatever. The corporate structure provides both continuation (hire another developer to replace them), and discreteness (you never actually *hear* in public, about the differences between developers, flame wars, immaturity, etc, but that doesn't mean they aren't there).
Also, companies go out of business and commercial software does get abandoned, just like open source.
So, commercial software has, usually, a corporate structure which provides continuity. What does open source have? A few things. . . the chief one being access to the source code. Maybe the project will have to change names, but I'm pretty sure it will continue. In a *well run* Open Source project, there wouldn't be a single point of failure - one guy holding all the keys. Instead, you'd have things split up among 2 to 3 people who can control things like the domain name, irc channels, etc. Additionally, for a *very well run* open source project (though most probably wouldn't go this far), you'd have a non-profit foundation with a board of directors who is the 'owner' of things like domain names, servers, etc.
That way, if the person(s) controlling key assets like servers or domain names goes 'rogue', the non-profit foundation can exert it's ownership, and sieze control back from that person who was designated as the 'administrator'. That may require going to court, but if the organization is on record as being the 'owner' of those assets, and can prove it, the court will use its power to restore control of those assets to the rightful owner.
Unfortunately, since most Open Source projects start out as one guy or gal, they often seem to never get around to the stage of maturity of making the project independent of that person - I think part of that is ego on the part of the project founder. They are too small minded, often, to think of the project in terms bigger than themselves, and give up control.
Which brings us back to the source. AT LEAST, we always have the source, which means no Open Source/Free Software project can ever truly die, unless nobody cares about it, then it doesn't matter if it does die. (If anybody was *using* an Open Source project, and it was vital to them, then they'd care enough about it to either maintain it themselves if they must, or get someone else to maintain it [which might mean spending some cash, but that's life]).
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The difference there is that your work was already delegated, you notified them of your intentions, AND you did give a somewhat plausible way to be found.
If they called and a park ranger needed to search a million acres of wilderness for some computer geek just because a server went down, it may not happen. They may not be quite as anxious about trying to find you, as say you went missing for 2 weeks in the woods with only 2 days worth of supplies.
One of my guys told me "I'm taking a 1 week vacation. I'm going in the woods with the clothes on my back, a pup tent, canteen and hunting knife." Either he was going to come out of the woods hungry, or he may not come out at all. He always managed to show up after the vacation happy, so who was I to complain. :)
He was "essential" to smooth operations, in that it was very helpful to have the full team working. If he never showed back up, we would have continued normally, and replaced him when we were confident he wasn't coming back.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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Man, sounds like you got managers or coworkers that don't respect you vacation. I think I've been called up twice on my vacation, once because a server password was missing in action and the second briefly discuss a change I'd worked with that had caused a serious regression. If you call me on my vacation it'd better fill this three criteria:
1) It's serious
2) I won't need any laptop, VPN or any remote access
3) There's good reason why you need exactly my input
4) It'll go to voicemail and I answer on my schedule
I absolutely go on vacation, but I don't put total absolute limits on it just like I'll answer a call from work in the evenings/weekends. It's a privilidge, don't abuse it and you don't bother me about recieving the occasional personal call during working hours and we're even. I call that a win-win situation, the day they become hardass I'll drop off the face of the earth when I go home.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
But you told your coworkers. This guy is AWOL. That's the difference.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
So tell me exactly why this is a problem for a bunch of geeks?
this pesky little thing called the law?
There is, however, something stopping anyone else from accessing the (allegedly) thousands of Euros of donations which went directly into the hands of one now missing person every month.
When you try to 'fork' a bank account, sometimes the people at the bank get a little upset.