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Jul. 31, 2009

In a very explicit letter, and according to 6 senior and very worried CentOS developers, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux open source project known as CentOS could be in serious trouble.

In an open letter posted on the CentOS homepage and the project's main 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. And it gets worse...

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

It also suggests that Davis hasn't followed through on an important promise made in the past to provide an update on the project's financial situation, complaining that phone calls to him have gone unanswered for more than two weeks. And according to one blog post, Davis hasn't been involved in the project since sometime in mid-2008.

According to the open 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.

Numerous efforts in trying to contact Lance Davis were unsuccessful. The open letter was a "last resort, not a first resort," the six Linux developers say.

Back in March 2003, Russ Herrold co-founded the CentOS project with Lance Davis.

"The CentOS project is something I helped found many years ago. If you're going to engage and not go forward with promises you make, you have to step aside. That's the way the world works. It's particularly the way free and open source projects works," said Herrold.

In his open letter, Herrold went on to say "Clearly the project dies on its own if all the developers walk away. 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."

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. No idea at all, and this is unacceptable."

"We would still like to make things right and give Lance the change to correct all this and open up to the group. If not, we will continue without him and get the project back on track anyway and with our own means. 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 just one single person. I sincerely apologize to everyone for this."

If the CentOS 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 Linux community. And this is unacceptable. We need to be totally transparent and Lance is preventing this," it says.

The project released the latest version of its RHEL clone, version 5.3, in May 2009, after being almost three months late.

As most people know in the Linux community, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a commercial distribution of the OS, available through a Red Hat paid subscription. However, the OS' source code is publicly available, and this is the basis for the CentOS project, available free of charge.

Overall, technical support is provided by the Linux community, with the project relying entirely on donations for cash.

Source: OS Today.

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