I’m going to start this post by saying I’m an agnostic as far as platform choice for servers, I prefer Windows for my desktop, and MySQL is a joke (I like SQL Server and PostgreSQL).
First, Alan Cox, the guy that maintained the TTY subsystem of the Linux kernel, apparently got sick of all the whining voices in the community, including a bitch session from Linus Torvalds, and decided to bail. And apparently he’s serious. Good for you, Alan!
Next up, the CentOS project administrator, Lance Davis, has apparently disappeared from the face of the earth, along with the project funds. CentOS, for those not familiar, is an enterprise-class Linux distribution built on Red Hat.
These types of public temper tantrums are entertaining, sure. I mean who doesn’t like a bit of drama? However, they also make me question the wisdom of building a business on something open source like CentOS. Sure, the source code will always be free, but I want to build applications and maintain those, and not have to worry about the progression of the operating system as well.
The Alan Cox thing isn’t a big deal, there is a system in place apparently and there’s a new maintainer who is already maintaining. It looks like there might be a small slowdown while that gets sorted out, but if he’s been acting like a defective as Linus seems to indicate in that email, then perhaps it will result in a speedup.
The CentOS situation is different. The main administrator apparently took off with the cookies, and from the open letter it would appear some things weren’t in order before that. And now he’s going away and they’re talking about the project dying, in public, on the front page of their website. That doesn’t instill confidence.
And speaking of cookies, and this is unrelated to everything else, it looks like federal websites might start using them! Welcome to 1998, guys!
Have a nice day!
Edit: Apparently the CentOS thing has been going on for some time. And apparently it has affected development.
Edit2: Looks like CentOS found their leader:
The CentOS Development team had a routine meeting today with Lance Davis in attendance. During the meeting a majority of issues were resolved immediately and a working agreement was reached with deadlines for remaining unresolved issues. There should be no impact to any CentOS users going forward.
The CentOS project is now in control of the CentOS.org and CentOS.info domains and owns all trademarks, materials, and artwork in the CentOS distributions.
We look forward to working with Lance to quickly complete all the agreed upon issues.
Still, can you trust the way they’re running things there?