Topic: CentOS Open Letter ....Developers Hanbags at 5 ft

[warren]

An Open Letter on the CentOS site seems to indicate a "handbag fight at 5ft   "

While the other developers state that the Os is not dead or goining away,
it is somewhat sad that these occurances always seem to add ammunition to the
detractors of Open Source, which ultimately makes it harder to drive and penetrate into
the playing space of proprierty OS's.

On the other hand, the other member of the development team are showing the way in requesting
transparency in the operation of Open Source Projects.

What do the rest of our SME members think ?

Warren

July 30, 2009 04:39 UTC

This is an Open Letter to Lance Davis from fellow CentOS Developers

It is regrettable that we are forced to send this letter but we are left with no other options. For some time now we have been attempting to resolve these problems:

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.

When I (Russ) try to call the phone numbers for UK Linux, and for you individually, I get a telco intercept 'Lines are temporarily busy' for the last two weeks. Finally yesterday, a voicemail in your voice picked up, and I left a message urgently requesting a reply. Karanbir also reports calling and leaving messages without your reply.

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

Clearly the project dies 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.

Sincerely,

Russ Herrold
Ralph Angenendt
Karanbir Singh
Jim Perrin
Donavan Nelson
Tim Verhoeven
Tru Huynh
Johnny Hughes

[hkgonra]

Kinda scary considering just how many servers out there are running centos not to mention the number of projects ( like this one ) that use Centos as a base.

[cactus]

More details: http://planet.centos.org/

[CharlieBrady]

On the other hand, the other member of the development team are showing the way in requesting transparency in the operation of Open Source Projects.

Sounds familiar

What do the rest of our SME members think ?

Transparency and accountability are necessary and important. There and here.

[CharlieBrady]

An Open Letter on the CentOS site seems to indicate a "handbag fight at 5ft   "

That's over dramatising it somewhat.

[warren]

That's over dramatising it somewhat.

Charlie, it was meant more tongue-in-cheek than literal,
more like '..hanbags at 5ft ...     followed by ... each other followed by 

[kruhm]

Sounds familiar

About wet my pants when I read that.

Transparency and accountability are necessary and important. There and here.

Second that. I would think most OSS projects go through the same types of issues. It's how they handle issues that sets them apart. This has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with leadership and organization.

Centos has updated it's homepage to reflect how they handled it: http://centos.org/

It only took 2 days! I think everyone involved with the SME project could learn something from watching the recent happenings at the CENTOS project.