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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."
Maybe he and Alan Cox have eloped?
Did they try the lost+found directory?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
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
"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.
http://planet.centos.org/
You can read a bit more there what has happened.
Yeah, he probably died and no one, not even his wife, knew that he was a closet Linux Geek. They'll be going over his record, find the accounts, and she'll be crying "Oh my God, I never knew. Why didn't he tell me?!?! We could have worked on it TOGETHER!" Only then you realize that his wife was a closet Linux Developer, and actually responsible for a great deal of OS content.
It'd be be like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but really nerdy.
Right. Just ask Gov Mark Sanford.
He was just out hiking the Appalachian Trail and his staff and the media and his constituents got all verklempt.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Definitely in Argentina.
that's my word, holla...
From Tim Verhoeven. It explains the issues a little more in depth.
Read the post here.
I'm not sure how far he's gonna get with $27.50, a bag of skittles, and an old copy of 2600.
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.
Nerd missing for two weeks. Found to have been on WoW binge.
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.
And that's why you should run RH / OEL on mission critical systems. Not trolling, just facing the reality.
Then again he may be on his period, or have problems with his colon.
They really need to stop advertising themselves as being "enterprise-class" then.
Maybe he killed his wife and needs some time to remove the passenger front seat. Takes some time to clean up you know? Geez, cut him some slack!
But still, would it really be that hard to post something like "Wife dead, BRB" on the mailing list?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I totally agree with the "bus syndrome" thinking. At one company I was at for many years, the boss had that concern. I was the senior SysAdmin, who created and managed the entire IT infrastructure. To alleviate it, everything was documented. A copy of the passwords were kept under lock and key. Server functions were well documented. My assistant(s) (depending on the year I had 1 to 4) could continue smooth operations without me.
Keeping the "bus syndrome" mentality, should I be unavailable for a day or days, there were no problems. I could fly between cities to do work, and not panic that the whole world was going to fall apart while I was on a plane. I still got plenty of phone calls, simply because it was my baby. Junior admins didn't want to make widespread changes without my seal of approval, even if it was a quick phone call where they gave me a brief outline of their changes, and I gave them verbal approval ("Go for it. Let me know how it goes.").
The day came that they decided I wasn't necessary. I was locked out of the machines per my own plan, and then notified that I was no longer part of the company. Whoever did the changing wasn't quite as consistent as I was and missed a few spots. Being a "good guy", I verified that I was locked out of everywhere, and sent a list (it was short) of what I still had access to, so they could get those too. The missed spots were non-essential, so even if I had a desire to do bad things, I couldn't have broken much.
The password plan had better motives than firing the top guy. On password change day, I issued the passwords on slips of paper to the people who needed them (and to the vault). Should someone's passwords become compromised, I could have all the passwords changed in approx 5 minutes. Should something seem funny, we'd change the passwords. Usually we just changed them because the existing passwords had been in use for too long. We did have someone lose their USB key with their SSH keys on it. We went through the well practiced drill. It turned out to be just an exercise. The key had fallen out of his pocket, and was under the seat of his car.
When they terminated me, the company lived on. The transition was smooth without me. I may as well have been hit by a bus. No one asked me "how do I....?", because it was all there for those with access who knew what to look for. Even if we had a walkout of all IT staff, things were documented well enough where an experienced IT person could walk in and keep things running.
We were a high dollar, small staff company. Why should somewhere like CentOS be any different?
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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