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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!
"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
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
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.
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]).
If RedHat doesn't want to share their code, then they should build their own OS, instead of just working on the pre-existing huge resource that is Linux/GPLed code. See how that works? They agreed to CentOS-style reuse of their work in exchange for THEIR for-profit reuse of decades worth of OTHER people's work; that's the price of the GPL, and they pay it willingly, because what they get is so valuable.
And speaking of cynicism: anyone stop to think that maybe some overaggressive RedHat executive with a suitcase full of cash is behind Lance's disappearance? Follow the money: CentOS looks unreliable ==> RedHat cashes in....
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.
You do realize that technically Redhat is just skating by on the free give-aways of others, too, don't you?
I mean, as I understand the whole Linux thing. Feel free to correct me.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Not to diminish the contribution by Red Hat, which is pretty extensive, the above argument is invalid. Red Hat did not create the products included in their distributions. They take existing free software, package it, and sells it as part of a complete package, including support. The software is still free.
Some projects whose products are included in Red Hat distributions were created by Red Hat and staffed by Red Hat personnel. They chose the GPL anyway. They have even purchased several companies and relicensed the products of those companies under the GPL. Do you really think that Red Hat would have done this if they thought that this would severely impact their business?
We periodically see companies trying to make open source products switch to closed source for this very reason.
Those companies are in a very different situation. They own the copyrights to their entire code base, and are thus able to change the license to a proprietary one if they think that it will create an advantage. Companies like Red Hat cannot do this, since many of the components of their products are free software. They could have done it with those components that they have written themselves, or acquired the producers of, but they mostly haven't.
While legal, I think it is morally wrong.
Why? Not even Red Hat think so. They argue that people or organizations that have little or no money are not their target market, and thus, it doesn't impact them that those instead use free rebuilds of their product. In fact, it is a better option for them than to use a completely different distribution, such as a Debian one, since using CentOS means that you are already used to their distribution, and may become a customer in the future when you have acquired the financial capabilities, as well as the demand for commercial support contracts.
The way I see it, it's their company. They can either keep me around forever, and appreciate the work I do, or let me go. Either way, I did a good job while I was there.
As I heard it through the grapevine, they spent an absolute fortune redoing everything I did. They switched the servers away from Linux to FreeBSD. They didn't optimize things as well as I had, so that left them in a situation where things simply didn't work as well. They rewrote a lot of my software. Some was trivial, and some was very intricate. I strongly suspect they were trying to defeat my back doors that they were never able to find. The funny part was, I didn't leave any back doors. If I leave a back door for myself, that means there's a back door for someone else to exploit. I spent enough time watching the front door for trouble, why should I have to double my work? :)
The only contact I've maintained is watching their Alexa score drop. It's nothing related to anything I did, but I strongly suspect there have been some nasty technical issues, since some people have called and emailed me saying that the site was suddenly unavailable, or throwing weird errors. I know what the weird errors were. Misconfigured servers, because they were deviating from my well constructed and tested plans. Some of them were obvious. They put into production what I had already tested and decided were not satisfactory for that environment. C'est la vie. I moved on to better things, and they were stumbling over old hurdles. It seems that happens a lot. Places like to second guess the work of old staff just for the sake of trying to make him/her look bad. Sometimes it's just to justify why they got rid of him/her, even years after he could care less. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.