CentOS Administrator Reappears

str8edge sends word that Lance Davis, the CentOS project administrator who had mysteriously gone absent, has now returned and is working with the development team to get things back on track. From their announcement: "The CentOS Development team had a routine meeting today with Lance Davis in attendance. During the meeting a majority of issues were resolved immediately and a working agreement was reached with deadlines for remaining unresolved issues. There should be no impact to any CentOS users going forward. The CentOS project is now in control of the CentOS.org and CentOS.info domains and owns all trademarks, materials, and artwork in the CentOS distributions. We look forward to working with Lance to quickly complete all the agreed upon issues. More information will follow soon."

Comments

More likely

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

Lance realized this very public oops wasn't going to do anything for his future employment prospects. A shame it had to come to that, but sometimes you need to upgrade from a feather to a cattle prod to get results.

Re:More likely

[Vellmont]

And CentOS relying on one person for as much as seemingly their very existence (by their own tone over this issue) has absolutely guaranteed that I will never use CentOS for anything important.

If by "CentOS" you're talking about the Centos.org domain and some IRC channels, you're right. If by "CentOS" you mean updating and developing the operating system, you're wrong. Any open source project is always about the developers behind it. There are many developers involved in this project, and the project itself isn't dependent any any one of them.

My guess is the thing you care about is the OS and not a domain name. Drawing conclusions from tone and not facts is just a bad practice in general.

Re:More likely

[sabernet]

"relying on one person for as much as seemingly their very existence"

Ssssh! Do you want to start a flamewar with the Apple fans too?

....sorry, had to :)

Re:More likely

[operator_error]

The philosophy that has been applied to Debian development has served it well over the years. Consider using either it, or a derivative like Ubuntu. Since I have chosen this path, I've had no regrets.

This is a complete debacle for CentOS.

Re:More likely

[Linker3000]

Do you not think that the issues at the heart of your (very valid) concerns are now being addressed - albeit a little later than they should have been?

I think the situation with CentOS's command and control structure merits monitoring for a short while to see how things settle down.

FWIW I have around 10 servers running various versions of CentOS and am keeping an eye on developments.

Re:More likely

[Macka]

1. If the health of the company and their product is absolutely dependent on the well being of Lance, then they should have done everything they could to keep this story quiet, as it is embarrassing.

They did. Washing your dirty laundry in public is never pleasant, but in this case they needed to find a way to get Lance to engage and had run out of options. Shining a public spotlight on him seems to have done the trick, so it was the correct move.

2. A cranky engineer screwing off for a few days is common enough that it was a non-story to begin with

They've been trying to resolve this quietly for about a year and they were getting no where.

And CentOS relying on one person for as much as seemingly their very existence (by their own tone over this issue) has absolutely guaranteed that I will never use CentOS for anything important.

Hm, I smell the fresh scent of manure in the air. From your tone I'd bet that you never have used CentOS for anything important, or you wouldn't be so quick to give it up. Not that this is going to be an issue for much longer, which makes your objection pointless.

Re:More likely

[jjohnson]

What's not to rely on? The distribution itself was never in danger. The only thing Lance controlled was the domain name, some IRC channels, and the PayPal account. Now Lance has handed those things over, and they'll move forward with a foundation to control the project.

CentOS, FOSS, and leadership problems.

[cenc]

Everyone will jump on this as proof that open source projects can not be trusted or relied on. Now, that may or may not be true. This instance really is not a poster child for problems with FOSS projects. We are talking about a project based on repackaging and rebranding a commercial distro. The heavy lifting is done by RH and other projects.

This should be food for thought however about other projects, which there are many many instances of FOSS project management issues leaving users high and dry because of political issues.

We really need some better organizational standards for FOSS project management, not just high quality code. Remember the segment of society we are talking about. They might be great at programing or whatever, but they rarely have the leadership and organization skills to handle a project once it reaches a critical mass of popularity or use.

One of the first things I have to do, after years of using FOSS, is look at the project and see how healthy it is before deciding to implement it in my biz. I have to do things like look at how many projects have derived work from it, who is contributing to it, how alive is the forum community both for developers and users, development cycles, and so on.

What we really need is some sort of organizational certification. Something that an end user of FOSS or other FOSS project can with one glance determine what is the status of the organization and the project. Especially the large important ones. Are there for example policies in place to handle the death of the head of the project? Is there a formal system for order of succession? Is there policy for archiving legacy code and related information?

The worse thing that can happen to a FOSS project is a cult of personality forming around just one person ( that is more than just PR).