| Is CentOS ready for the fork? |
Jul. 31, 2009
 Developers for the community-based CentOS Linux distribution have threatened founder Lance Davis with a project fork unless he becomes more active in the project and accounts for fund contributions. Currently rev'd to version 5.3, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone depends largely on voluntary contributions.
As noted yesterday in a CNET story by Stephen Shankland, key developers of the popular RHEL clone, including Russ Herrold, Ralph Angenendt, Karanbir Singh, and Tim Verhoeven, posted an open letter to founder Davis on the CentOS home page, complaining about a number of unresolved issues. These include lack of accountability regarding the use of funds from donations, advertising, and sponsorships, as well as a general lack of participation by Davis.
"You seem to have crawled into a hole ... and this is not acceptable," write the developers. "Please do not kill CentOS through your fear of shared management of the project," they continue. "Clearly the project dies if all the developers walk away."
Meanwhile, a FAQ that accompanies the letter states, "The developers will move to another domain if there is no other option. Protective backups are in place; hot machines exist to allow for a cutover with a simple one time installation of one RPM package. We continue to refine our plans if this might be the case, to make the transition as smooth as possible."
The CNET story, which noted that Davis had not responded to a request for comment, pointed to a blog by CentOS security and infrastructure developer Dag Wieers, who commented on the financial questions. According to Wieers, the open source project is now largely run on contributions of time, hardware, bandwidth, and other services.
Missing funds alleged
Earlier in the project, however, CentOS actively sought to raise funds from Google AdSense ads and web-site sponsorship, as well as direct user donations through PayPal. Those funds have never been accounted for, writes Wieers. He concludes that in addition to the need for accounting of funds, a foundation needs to be established similar to those of other major Linux distributions.
In response to the lack of accountability, the rest of team has removed all advertising and stopped accepting PayPal donations, writes Wieers. Indeed, while a donation button is prominently located under the open letter on the CentOS site, it leads to a screen that states, "The CentOS team is current [sic] evaluating our donation program. Please check back for updated information after August 15, 2009."
A fork in the road?
Management disputes and ego clashes are quite common in open source community projects such as CentOS, yet this one appears to be more than a passing dust-up. Judging from Wieers' blog and the open letter, the dispute has been festering for years, with repeated private requests for accountability and changes ignored by Davis.
On the other hand, as Shankland notes in his CNET account, major forks are rarer than one might think in established open source community projects. Despite the fact that anyone is free to modify the code, give it a new name, and start a new project, it usually doesn't occur in a large, complex project unless there's a wholesale mutiny of the vast majority of the contributors.
Even then, the logistical issues can be daunting, not to mention the challenges of re-branding and maintaining the user base. More often, projects with serious ongoing schisms tend to simply fade away as developers and users seek greener pastures.
CentOS 5.3
CentOS is targeted at those who need enterprise-class operating system stability without the cost of certification and support involved with RHEL, with which it claims 100 percent compatibility. The CentOS project released version 5.3 of the distribution in April for i386 and x86-64 architectures.
The maintenance release builds on major changes in version 5.0 in 2007 and version 5.2, which was released in June 2008. These include improved desktop support with Compiz and AIGLX, and the introduction of Sabayon "to simplify the construction of user profiles." The new release also continues to improve virtualization features introduced in version 5.0 with the integrated Xen hypervisor with Virtual Machine Manager and Libvirt, says the project.
The 5.3 release is said to include the updated application versions:- Apache-2.2, php-5.1.6, kernel-2.6.18
- Gnome-2.16, KDE-3.5
- OpenOffice.org-2.
- Evolution-2.12
- Firefox-3.0
- Thunderbird-2.0
- MySQL-5.0
- PostgreSQL-8
Availability
The open letter, FAQ, and links to CentOS 5.3 downloads may be found at the main site, here. Dag Wieers' blog may be found here.
Stephen Shankland's CNET story on the dispute, "CentOS Linux developers threaten mutiny," may be found here.
-- Eric Brown
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