Filed under: Developer, Linux, Red Hat, Open Source, Op-Ed
Drama shakes up CentOS community
by Christina Warren Jul 31st 2009 at 8:00PM
Update: Slashdot is reporting that CentOS co-founder, Lance Davis has reappeared and that the domain, trademarks and artwork are now under the stewardship of the CentOS Project. Let's hope they file the proper legal forms ASAP.
For users or businesses that want to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) but don't feel like ponying up the required subscription fee to get the binary, CentOS has been a great option. Essentially, CentOS take the source from RHEL (which is released to the community), repackages it and offers up the binary for free to anyone who wants it. Although RHEL isn't really my favorite server-based Linux distro, one of my web servers uses CentOS, and it's a pretty decent solution.
Yesterday, some of the developers and maintainers of the CentOS project posted an open letter to Lance Davis, the co-founder of the CentOS proect.
It reads, in part:
You seem to have crawled into a hole ... and this is not acceptable.
You have long promised a statement of CentOS project funds; to this date this has not appeared.
You hold sole control of the centos.org domain with no deputy; this is not proper.
You have, it seems, sole 'Founders' rights in the IRC channels with no deputy ; this is not proper.
(...)
Please do not kill CentOS through your fear of shared management of the project.
For quite some time, it appears, Davis has been absent from meetings, unresponsive to messages and requests and just generally unavailable to the other project developers. As one of the co-signers of the letter, Tim Verhoeven points out in his own blog entry, this is problematic because not only is the centos.org domain in Davis's sole control (and he has now secured it with an anonymizing service so the owner of the domain isn't visible), the accounts from the Google AdSense ads and the PayPal accounts where donors have contributed to the project are also completely in Davis's control.
That creates a problem because money individuals think is going to help the project is really just going to one person who is doing God-only-knows-what with it.
At this point, it appears that all the developers hope that this situation with Davis can be resolved amicably, and that the project can move forward, but if this last-resort of sorts doesn't yield the proper answers, the project will have to move to another domain, potentially adopt another name and lose any funds that have already been donated to the cause.
Not only would changing names be annoying for CentOS users (who then have to decide if they want to follow the fork or not, or more than likely, convince their bosses why they need to follow the fork), the project loses out on six years of branding.
As Serdar Yegulalp from InformationWeek points out, this really highlights one biggest hurdles volunteer-based open source projects face when trying to compete against proprietary or corporate-backed open sourced projects: professionalism.
More and more businesses are migrating, or considering migrating, to free and open source solutions. These migrations are not about ideology, they are primarily motivated by cost, pure and simple. But cost is about more than just a monetary license fee. Having a stable, reliable development team (and not having key assets under the control of one person with no legal or contractual obligations to anyone else, including the users) has a cost too, and it is important to recognize those types of costs before choosing a platform or service.
This isn't to say that the CentOS team is unprofessional. I actually think being public about the matter and attempting to take control of the situation shows real integrity and maturity. Let's just hope that the future of CentOS can go into a direction that is controlled less by one person, and more under the stewardship of a foundation that offers up more transparency.
[via Slashdot]
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
MarkyB86 said 8:26PM on 7-31-2009
Anyone know what that icon theme is called?
Reply
MarkyB86 said 8:32PM on 7-31-2009
Bluecurve, nvm
motang said 9:03PM on 7-31-2009
Yeah I like that icon set, I run Ubuntu on all my machines, but unfortunately it doesn't work well. Oh well, Gnome-colors FTW! :)
MarkyB86 said 10:14PM on 7-31-2009
Gnome colors is sweet, I've been using gnome-wise
blaszta said 4:42AM on 8-01-2009
This is a really sad news for open source community.
Reply
motang said 9:35AM on 8-01-2009
Yeah I agree, I do hope it's resolved soon.
Molly said 10:48AM on 8-01-2009
"not ... unprofessional"??? "maturity"???
sorry, but this looks like a bunch of toddlers in a sandbox. one walks away, taking all the buckets and shovels, while the rest is left to cry.
Reply
Christina Warren said 11:06AM on 8-01-2009
I don't disagree, but I was more trying to commend the team for being open and doing the right thing, rather than condeming them for letting it get this far. I agree it smacks of ameteur hour, but hopefully that can change going forward.
Molly said 11:36AM on 8-01-2009
well, Christina, they don't have much of a choice, now have they?
as sorry as i feel for the developer team, "free" and "open source" or not, there are legal matters to be taken into consideration. they obviously failed to tie up those matters in legally binding contracts. and now that the guy holding all the keys (and the cash register) walks out on them, their project is pretty much doomed. no matter how petty the feud, there isn't really much left for them to do other than whining in "open letters".
Reply
Christina Warren said 12:31PM on 8-01-2009
Again, we're in total agreement. I certainly don't think that the open source nature of the project mitigates the irresponsibility of not having the proper legal and contractual procedures in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening. As I said, these are the types of "costs" that need to be considered when choosing a product or service. Just because RHEL and CentOS share the same code doesn't mean the customer is going to have the same assurances.