CentOS Project Administrator Goes AWOL | Hacker News Reader

CentOS Project Administrator Goes AWOL

linux.slashdot.org

41 pointsalexkay37 comments

Damn, what if he's lying dead in a ditch somewhere and all anyone cares about is his AdSense account!

Given that he went missing over seven months ago, I imagine somebody would have read the obituary by now. Or the missing persons report, or whatever.

That's what I thought as well, but after reading more about it, it sounds like this has been a gradual disappearance. He would show up intermittently at meetings and never commit to actually getting anything done. His answers were always "I'll look into that later" and later never came.

I still hope that he's just burnt out and sick of the project versus being unwell or worse.

Open source projects are harsh mistresses, lots of flack and fairly little return for it. You have to have a thick skin to be active at a high level in open source.

This reminds me.. I got to update the old.. "if a bus hits Tim" documents here at work.

It's nuts how many people and businesses just never consider this. I'd have thought that they'd be especially more careful since there's no binding contract or whatever between the developers.

As a separate sidenote (don't know if this is the case with centos), this might be one issue with the benevolent dictator for life method of running things, as efficient as it may be.

We actually refer to the "Train Number" on any of our given projects here. The train number is the number of people that could get hit by a train before the project fails. If the number is 1 (meaning there is a single critical point for the project), then we know that cross training has to occur.

I've heard it called Bus Factor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor) or Truck Number (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki/wikibase?TruckNumber).

Yeah, we use Train number because the new light rail system is right outside our office and it looks like someone damn near gets hit from walking in front of the train about 3 times a day.

I worked for a place where our boss quit with less than two weeks notice.

At least he was still quite friendly to us, and would answer any questions we had over AIM.

I really hope his disappearance is the end of this story. The CentOS folks need to be double checking every bit this guy has touched and fully explore the other security ramifications. It is a bit concerning how much (PR) damage one person could do. I can't even grasp the level of crisis this would inflict on the Linux community (OSS in general) if the story turns worse. (sabotage, backdoors, etc)

not sure why you got modded down, this is a factor with the resignation of any key person in any major enterprise. Surely CentOS is no exception to the rule.

There is an open letter up at http://www.centos.org/

Please do not kill CentOS through your fear of shared management of the project.

This.

CentOS itself may hit the skids but the thing that CentOS represents to the community will probably never die. Before CentOS had critical mass White Box Enterprise Linux was another distribution doing the same thing.

It may well be time for everybody else (signers on the open letter, for example) to found a replacement project and suggest everyone migrate over. Then the guy who's losing interest can decide whether he wants to play ball or go home.

several months of absence of a decision is also a decision.

It is funny that incidents like this highlight a fundamental difference between bazaar style foss on the one side 'closed' source and corporate style foss on the other (for instance redhat), the issues surrounding individuals would never shine through as bright in a corporate setting. The corporate identity shields to some extent the fact that it too is made up out of individuals.

There is more information at http://planet.centos.org Apparently he's been AWOL for some months now.

Hopefully he is well.

I used centos for a bit with my cluster, but now use http://www.caoslinux.org for use with Perceus. Not that I had problems with centos, but the integration of the latter two couldn't be better.

First Alan Cox, and now this? I think something fishy is going on...

Well I'm still here... Hang on, there's somebody at the door and I can hear helicopters...... <NO CARRIER>

I don't suppose there's any way we can nip the "registering throwaway accounts to make a joke" thing in the bud before it gets out of hand, is there?

I think a short waiting period before being able to post might solve a lot of problems at once. If you had to wait 24 hours after registering an account before your could post a comment, how many spam, joke posts, and throwaway accounts wouldn't happen?

Yeah, but a lot of really interesting posts wouldn't happen either.

I once had this conversation via email with one of the slashdot guys. He was considering banning AnnoymousCoward back then, and asked if I could point to any worthy posts that might have been posted by a signed account, and I pointed him to a thread in which an AC who claimed to be ex-FBI had some pretty insightful and thoughtful comments on police corruption and warrantless searches and such. He acknowledged it was a good example but said it was the only one he had seen thus far.

in spite of all the trolling some of the very best stuff on /. is by ac posters. It's the one reason I still read it at -1 but I make sure I don't read it while I'm eating.

How about the ability to FLAG a comment as "supposed to be funny", then we can opt to show the funny comments or not individually.

Decline of great online communities starts with "funny". Reddit is hilarious and I couldn't spend 10 minutes there.

I know this is supposed to be funny, but this is the FIRST thing that came to my mind today.

I operate many CentOS, Ubuntu AND Red Hat servers. Seeing key developers drop from the Linux community (which is the way it sounds) and then to see the lead project manager of CentOS VANISH is absolutely terrifying.

Here was my SECOND thought. Should I just be using MS servers for everything?

THIRD thought, maybe Red Hat at the very least.

Stuff like this puts a huge scar on open source for the nervous folks like me. I want to rely on a huge company no more than I do an open source project run by random people around the world, but I just don't have much of a choice, and situations like these make me feel totally out of control, and when this happens, I have to consider paying more so I know the company that manages my OS will be around tomorrow.

I don't have a "what if a bus hits my OS" document, and I didn't think I needed one, but all of a sudden... I think that maybe I do.

>I operate many CentOS, Ubuntu AND Red Hat servers

Would you have been better off if you had used a proper professional Unix from, Sun or Dec or Compaq

>Should I just be using MS servers for everything?

As long as you don't mind switching to a new OS when their marketing dept decides it's time.

Alan Cox didn't "drop from the Linux community". He's just resigned as maintainer of a specific part of the kernel.

Well, yes when you put it like that - however, that CentOS guy apparently was not in any active role in the project for quite some time now and his disappearance does nothing to CentOS.

When other people, who actively participate in the project, quit - like Alan Cox did, most of them - if not all - responsibly manage the transition.

Holy crap! There goes 25 of my ESX host machines. Might have to buy RHEL now.

We've been using CentOS in-house but shipping on Redhat RHEL. I imagine that is fairly common. I wonder if Redhat asked the guy to kill the project (for a small compensation of course), so the only available RHEL binaries are produced and sold by Redhat. We would essentially be forced to get licenses for all our testing and dev machine, which is not cheap.

This is definetly troublesome and suspicious.

Please, there's no need for such FUD.

I work at Red Hat, and the general feeling I see internally is very positive towards CentOS. Sure, there are a few who would like to be more aggressive about converting CentOS users to RHEL subscriptions, but I definitely don't see any conspiracy to kill CentOS.

Besides, the problems now at CentOS are administrative. If that open letter doesn't accomplish anything, the project could still go on at a new domain under new, broader leadership.

Indeed. And from outside Red Hat, it's hard to see how you guys would even see this as a problem. RHEL is a for-pay product, it's not a free-as-in-beer distribution. So given that there's a market for free distros, clearly RH would prefer people use and target CentOS than Ubuntu or debian.

Bingo. Plus, there's always Scientific Linux as an alternative (full disclosure: I work for FNAL, but not on SL), if things completely fall apart in the CentOS camp. I'd have a hard time imagining a situation with CentOS that couldn't be easily resolved with a new domain and some debate over an organizational charter, though.

> Besides, the problems now at CentOS are administrative.

When the lead developer disappears for a month, without saying anything. Another developer leaves, disgruntled. Nobody knows what happens with the money from donations. Those are very serious problems. The kind of problems that kills a project.

I am sorry for overreacting in respect to Redhat. I know you guys are great. We use your product. (Although we do like CentOS more for us dev people and for testing, because it saves us tens of thousands dollars ;-)

I agree that those are nasty problems, but with the passion that went into the open letter, I believe that the project will survive.

I'm glad that you're not actually soured on Red Hat. And if the best way for you to support your products on RHEL is to use CentOS, that's still a win for us. :)

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