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

Appalachian Trail

[yoghurt]

Hiking that Appalachian trail can be tricky. I hear it goes all the way to Argentina.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Me neither! My mission critical servers are too important to trust to open source. I am switching everything to Windows.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, RedHat ES is only $349 a year. You could just migrate to RedHat ES and enjoy full support while still having the same features and environment as CentOS...

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.

Re:More likely

[MoralHazard]

OK, how the hell did the parent poster get modded to +5, informative? He has the wrong facts on virtually EVERY important point. He could have read yesterday's Slashdot. article, or just Googled the damn story, but I guess he didn't have the time.

Let's correct his factual problems, shall we?

  1) The CENTOS organization is not a "company", nor is the distro a "product". It's an informally-organized open source project, and the Linux distro they produce isn't sold or supported for profit by the project, itself. (There are many other companies that do provide CENTOS support contracts, though, and some of the developers may own/work for some of those companies.)

  2) The health of the CENTOS distro and organization were never "absolutely dependent" on Lance Davis. He controlled the project's domain name registration, the Google AdWords account, and a few other important resources. But these were inconveniences, at worst: Had Lance not responded to the open letter, the rest of the developers would simply have registered a new domain name, set up new repos/wikis/blogs, and copied the project data over. Lance would have been forgotten as the speed bump that he was. (And if Lance breaks his promises AGAIN and fails meet the latest deadlines, this is what we'll see happen.)

  3) Lance Davis didn't "screw off for a few days"--over the course of a year, he repeatedly made and broke promises, and failed to either provide accounting for the project's finances or to turn the relevent logins over to other group members. Then, he just stopped returning phone calls and emails, and he quit attending real-life and IRC meetings. Meanwhile, the Google AdWords account was raking in a few thousand dollars per month, and to all outward appearances, it looked a lot like Lance was just taking it for himself.

THE REAL STORY:

The lack of a formal structure (a la nonprofit incorporation, like Fedora or Debian) seems to be CENTOS's biggest problem, and the community's perception of this dispute does cloud the project's future. But like any open-source project, it's impossible for one person to be anything more than an inconvenience.

  * The source code repos and packages are globally mirrored by dozens of independent organizations, and Lance Davis never had control over any of them.

  * Domain registration, hosting, and such are cheap--even if some of the AdWords money were misappropriated, the developers could still pass the hat and/or offload bandwidth to the mirror providers. Hell, they could always move to SourceForge for free, if they were really desperate.

  * As long as the CENTOS core community learns its lesson, here, they can recover and grow stronger than before. They need to incorporate as a not-for-profit foundation, establish a board of directors, executive roles, accounting practices, and all the other structural crap that goes with it. It's not a trivial amount of work (in the US, at least--I don't know about the UK), but this episode demonstrates why successful, influential, long-lived F/OSS groups like the GNU, Debian, etc. have all decided to go this route.

Finally, on a personal note, I would like to ask yttrstein why he feels compelled to burden the rest of us with his un-informed opinions on this topic. He could have easily researched the issue, in about 5 or 10 minutes, and perhaps contributed something worth reading.

Re:More likely

[FreakyGreenLeaky]

Finally, on a personal note, I would like to ask yttrstein why he feels compelled to burden the rest of us with his un-informed opinions on this topic. He could have easily researched the issue, in about 5 or 10 minutes, and perhaps contributed something worth reading.

He's probably 12 years old or 45 and lives in his mom's basement. His mindless gurgle resulted in your interesting post, so perhaps he'll learn something before his 8pm scheduled online/pr0n wank session...

Re:More likely

[jez9999]

Finally, on a personal note, I would like to ask yttrstein why he feels compelled to burden the rest of us with his un-informed opinions on this topic. He could have easily researched the issue, in about 5 or 10 minutes, and perhaps contributed something worth reading.

You must be new here.

Did he...

[jsse]

reappear in front of the team one day, with bloodstain and mud all over his body, and yelled "I'm single, AGAIN!".

I needed something to cheer me up

[Linker3000]

Good news.

Here I am in my sickbed writing rsync scripts for cross-site backups between CentOS-based servers, and seeing the headline made me smile, in-between fits of coughing.

If by some amazing chance Karanbir Singh see this - I promise to rack up the dual Itanium server for IA64 testing and dev as soon as I get back to work and clean up a few other outstanding issues.

Great way to piss off LTS userbase.

[rikrebel]

This whole story is unnerving.

CentOS is widely used in datacenters due to it's red-hattyness, it's Long Term Support, and conservative adoption of whizbang.

It's by far my favorite distrobution for important servers.

I have already had two meetings over this and had my team start their proposals for alternate LTS distros and a migration plan. I am sure I am not the only one.

If the CentOS project manages to remove this single point of failure I think confidence will return. But I think I'll keep my projects going for a while just in case.

Re:Great way to piss off LTS userbase.

[jjohnson]

Isn't that just what this article is about? Lance Davis is AWOL for almost a year, the rest of the project publishes an open letter, Davis shows up and hands over the keys. What more resolution is needed?

In a way, this gives me some more confidence in CentOS, insofar as the rest of the admins were willing to "break glass in case of emergency" and deal with Davis' erratic leadership. They spent a long time trying to deal with it quietly and internally, but when it came down to it, they basically removed him the way all OSS projects end up doing it, with public pressure.

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).

Re:Maybe they should update the frontpage....

[jroysdon]

The developers we and are available and that never changed. Lance hadn't contributed in some time, and was really just wearing the "founder hat" and keys to the centos.org domain, irc found status, and paypal account.

Re:nobody worries about Slackware like CentOS

[iggymanz]

but slackware will probably die when Patrick does

Re:Argentina

[thejynxed]

Ahhhh, young grasshoppa'. You shall be enlightened!

A certain Republican Governor of South Carolina, Mr. Mark Sanford, claimed he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when in actuality, he was in Argentina getting his groove on with his Latina hoochie-mama. He's married, and was quite vocal about being "Pro-Family".

Hence all of the jokes, and why 9/11 Repugs holding public office are hypocrites of the first magnitude.