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CentOS Project Administrator Goes AWOL

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the going-out-for-smokes dept.

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."

7 of 492 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Peace by NinjaPablo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If he wants some time off and some peace & quiet, thats fine. Most people in this case would say 'I'll be gone for X weeks, Mr. Soandso will be covering for me in the interim, and has full access to everything I normally manage.', not just disappear and not return calls or emails.

    --
    SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
  2. Re:Eggs. Basket. by Stonent1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

  3. Re:Excellent example.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As opposed to with closed source projects, where when someone walks away with all the passwords everything's just fucking fine and peachy, right?

  4. Re:Eggs. Basket. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Maybe he *was* hit by a bus.

  5. Re:Peace by jernejk · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  6. Re:Peace by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Indeed, however afaict centos is a volunteer project. When the shit hits the fan in more important aspects of someones life then such volunteer projects become the last thing on someones mind. Hell for all we know he could be dead or hospitalised.

    They really need to stop advertising themselves as being "enterprise-class" then.

  7. Re:Is This Bus Syndrome? by mdm-adph · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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