Red Hat Enterprise clone poised to 'die'

The Register ^ | 30th July 2009 | Cade Metz

[Salo]

Red Hat Enterprise clone poised to 'die'

CentOS airs dirty laundry as admin 'vanishes'

Posted in Operating Systems, 30th July 2009 17:40 GMT

According to six concerned CentOS developers, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone is poised on the edge of the abyss.

In an open letter posted to the CentOS website and the project mailing list, six fellow developers accuse project co-founder Lance Davis of putting the entire project at risk by disappearing from everyday involvement without ceding control to others.

"You seem to have crawled into a hole...and this is not acceptable," the letter reads. "Please do not kill CentOS through your fear of shared management of the project."

According to the letter, Davis has seemingly disappeared while still maintaining sole control of the CentOS domain and sole "Founders" rights in the project's IRC channels. "This is not proper," the letter says - twice.

It also says that Davis hasn't followed through on a promise to provide an update on the project's financial situation, complaining that phone calls to him have gone unanswered for two weeks. And according to one blog post, Davis hasn't been involved in the project since sometime last year.

"Clearly the project dies if all the developers walk away," says the letter, apparently penned by developer Russ Herrold. "Please contact me, or any other signer of this letter at once, to arrange for the required information to keep the project alive at the 'centos.org' domain."

Efforts to contact Lance Davis and the six developers were unsuccessful. But some of the six have also discussed the situation on their personal blogs. According to one post, Davis also maintains control over the PayPal and Google AdSense accounts used by the CentOS websites.

"This basically means that all money that comes in through those channels went directly to him, not to the project" the post reads. "We again have no control over it. We repeatably asked Lance for a overview of the finances of the project, but he never showed that to the rest. We have no idea how much money flowed into the project."

If the developers are unable to resolve their differences with Davis, the post continues, they will move the project to a new domain. "The project depends too much on one person and a lot of things are invisible for the project and the community. And this is unacceptable. We need to be transparent and Lance is preventing this," it says.

"We still like to make things right and give Lance the change to correct all this and open up. If not we will continue without him and get the project back on track. And yes, this might potentially mean that we loose the centos.org domain and all the money already received by the project through the ads and PayPal. This is also what I regret the most, that money that people have donated, thinking they are helping the project, flowed to 1 person. I sincerely apologize to everyone for this."

According to another post, Davis "vanished" from the project sometime last year. And it too says Davis has sole access to the project's PayPal and Google AdSense accounts.

The project released the latest version of its RHEL clone, version 5.3, in April of this year.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a commercial distro, available through a RedHat paid subscription, but the source code is publicly available, and this is the basis for CentOS, available free of charge. Technical support is provided by the community, with the project relying entirely on donations for cash.

You can download the distro here. But the donation program is, well, unavailable. ®

[Salo]

Nice.

[Salo]

Pings.

[theDentist]

Sounds like an investigation will be warranted... embezzlement, perhaps?

[ShadowAce]

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

What would there be to embezzle?

[Westbrook]

> What would there be to embezzle?

Donations to the project.

Apparently, Davis is just pocketing the money.

[antiRepublicrat]

Idiots for joining on. Once a project gets to a size like this it would be a good idea to set up a company and have the lead devs be company officers.

This is one thing that troubles people about using some open source. Don’t trust your business to anything that doesn’t have a solid organizational structure. One guy getting hit by a bus or deciding to walk away shouldn’t cause a whole project die.

Handbrake’s main developer disappeared for quite a while too, putting the whole project in jeopardy. Luckily, the other devs forked it. Then the original developer came back and they joined the tree again.

[theDentist]

From above story: According to one post, Davis also maintains control over the PayPal and Google AdSense accounts used by the CentOS websites.
"This basically means that all money that comes in through those channels went directly to him, not to the project" the post reads. "We again have no control over it. We repeatably asked Lance for a overview of the finances of the project, but he never showed that to the rest. We have no idea how much money flowed into the project."

SO, could be $50. Could be $50K.

[dayglored]

Ouch. This is bad, and it also looks bad.

And it's personally annoying, since I have CentOS as the basis for a number of servers at work. Not that it'll suddenly stop running, but the future doesn't look bright for upgrade releases, etc....

[MichiganMan]

And it's personally annoying, since I have CentOS as the basis for a number of servers at work. Not that it'll suddenly stop running, but the future doesn't look bright for upgrade releases, etc....

No, but like antirepublicrat pointed out, just like open source lends itself to unofficial organizational structures that leave group leaders less accountable than corporate CEO's that can be fired, sued, etc for bad behavior, open source also allows a high degree of resiliency to disasters such as this that would potentially sink an incorporated company and consequently lock up its intellectual property forever. 

In this case, CentOS may die, but only in name as the developers that have the desire can just fork the project and release MillOS or whatever long before the last version of CentOS starts to get long in the tooth. 

Its a double edged sword to be sure, but most things in life are. 

[shorty_harris]

This is one thing that troubles people about using some open source. Don’t trust your business to anything that doesn’t have a solid organizational structure. One guy getting hit by a bus or deciding to walk away shouldn’t cause a whole project die.

Yep, remember Libranet? I liked that OS, even paid for it. That's one of the reasons I now use Ubuntu.

[N3WBI3]

Wow, this would just be a shame, CentOS has been a very decent outlet for small business to get started up. I have, myself, recommended it for some time as a ‘get to know you’ distro but had I known they were organizationally so bad I would have never recommended them.

Someone else will step up and do this, lesson learners..

[N3WBI3]

“Once a project gets to a size like this it would be a good idea to set up a company and have the lead devs be company officers.”

I would argue the time to form a corporation is right off the bat, there are so many lawsuit trolls out there I would not want to present myself as a target no matter how baseless the suit is.

[N3WBI3]

Worst case Cent forks... The other developers should set up their own organization..