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Aug. 17, 2009

On July 31, Linux News Today covered a rather disturbing news story that underscores some important issues on the core foundations of the CentOS project. No less than six senior and very worried CentOS developers wrote an open letter to the project's founder and posted it on the homepage of centos.org.

But to begin with, many in the Linux community will tell you that CentOS has never been a very transparent project. Most of its lists don't carry the kind of open discussions that can be found with Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora or even Novell's openSUSE project.

To be sure, there are some Linux users that don't even care or need to know from where their operating system comes from as long as it is Linux. However, and for the past ten years or more, there are developers who have seriously tried to help the project and bring its workings more into the open by working diligently as a bonded team of open source developers.

One of those was well-known RPM packager Dag Wieers, that resigned in June.

It was Wieers' turn to write an open letter: "It was not an easy decision and I feel sad for having to take it, but I decided to resign from the CentOS project. I hope the team can fix the project's leadership, communication and transparency issues even within the team, because each is very important for the health of the CentOS community."

And to make matters worse, nobody seems to know for now where the money which has flowed into the project (via donations and web advertising) has gone.

Quoting Dag Wieers again "For at least 3 years people were donating money and sponsors were paying for website ads while the money was not flowing into the project. Where it went to I can only guess! Raising the question was a risk to the project so everybody stayed quiet for the sake of the project hoping it would resolve itself.

Other key CentOS contributors were also forced to go public with their concerns. The move appears to have been entirely effective: Lance has finally met with the CentOS team. Ownership of the domain name has also been transferred, finally!

For now, the project appears to be back on track, and hopefully, headed towards a more democratic mode of operation, and one that will offer a lot more transparency.

But alas, little is being said about the financial side, beyond this: "We will be addressing these issues in the next few weeks, the plan at this time is to not turn on the donations option or advertising anywhere on the websites until we have such processes in place. So the management of future revenue into the project should be handled in a much more open way, and from now on, it needs to be fully accountable."

In the end, and to all the many observers in the Linux community, it is now very clear that use of an open source operating system such as CentOS does underscore some risks to its users. Any kind of server or computer running a CentOS distribution is relying on the efforts of a relatively small group of volunteers.

These volunteers aren't forced in any way to continue to provide support to anybody if they ever chose to do so. To a large degree, the project's very own governance and various processes are still questionable, even if it looks like things are finally improving.

Additionally, CentOS is fully dependent on Red Hat for all Linux security updates, and it necessarily imposes a certain delay between the release of Red Hat's patches and the availability of a fix for CentOS distributions.

Red Hat already discloses any security vulnerabilities which may exist on its OS.

On average, some are now saying that CentOS users have little to worry about. In the worst possible scenario, active CentOS developers could have always forked out the distribution and moved to a new domain name, perhaps without even changing the name of the project.

At any rate, such a move could certainly have been successful if it was necessary. However, CentOS users who have selected such a distribution known for its stability and reliability might just feel a little concerned about being told to change their repository pointers to a different location run by a group claiming to be the real CentOS.

Let's all hope that Lance and the CentOS team sort out and fix all their various issues and rapidly. About 55 to 60 percent of Web hosting providers have selected CentOS as their preferred Linux distribution. This simply means that millions of websites and email addresses depend on CentOS to work normally.

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Source: LCND.

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