CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

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CentOS must seem like a dream distribution to many. Its users get the benefit of the massive team of developers that Red Hat has working on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product without having to pay for any of it. CentOS offers a level of stability that cannot be found in any of the more community-oriented distributions; even Debian Stable requires its users to upgrade more often than CentOS does. Hosting providers have a solid, supported platform to sell to many thousands of customers, and it does not cost them even a single devalued US dollar. Many, many sites depend on CentOS, so anything which threatens the stability of that foundation is certain to raise a number of eyebrows. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened at the end of July.

CentOS has never been the most transparent of projects; its lists do not carry the kind of open discussion that can be found with Debian, Fedora, or (increasingly) openSUSE. Most CentOS users perhaps worry little about where their software comes from, but there are those who have tried to help the project and bring its workings more into the open. One of those, well-known RPM packager Dag Wieers, threw in the towel in June:

Problems within the project became more public on July 30, when a disturbing open letter was posted on centos.org. The immediate issue was the disappearance of project founder Lance Davis, whose last post on the centos-devel mailing list was in April, 2008. Evidently Lance hadn't been heard from for some time in other parts of the project as well. A missing founder can be a problem, but it gets worse: when Lance vanished from sight, he took with him control over the project's domain name and IRC channels.

Lance also had control over the project's finances. There has been a lot less noise concerning this part of the problem, but the fact remains: nobody seems to know where the money which has flowed into the project (via donations and web advertising) has gone. Quoting Dag Wieers again:

Naturally enough, this issue failed to resolve itself; eventually the other key CentOS contributors were forced to go public with their concerns. The move appears to have been entirely effective: Lance was flushed out from wherever he was hiding and met with the team. Ownership of the domain name has been transferred. The CentOS project appears to be back on track, and, perhaps, headed toward a more democratic mode of operation.

Little is being said about the financial side, beyond this:

So the management of future revenue into the project should be handled in a more open sort of way.

One could argue that CentOS users had little to worry about. In the worst possible scenario, the active CentOS developers could have forked the distribution and moved to a new domain, perhaps without even changing the name of the project. Such a move could certainly be successful. But users who have picked a distribution known for stability 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. A certain amount of disruption would have been guaranteed.

There is a lesson here: use of a distribution like CentOS has its risks. A system running CentOS is relying on the efforts of a relatively small group of volunteers; these volunteers are not obligated to continue to provide support to anybody. The project's governance and processes are on the murky side - even if it looks like things are about to get better. CentOS is fully dependent on Red Hat for security updates, and it necessarily imposes a delay between the release of Red Hat's fix (which discloses any vulnerability which wasn't already in the open) and the availability of a fix for CentOS. For the curious: here is the observed delay time a few recent updates:

Package	Delay (days)
seamonkey	1
bind	1
python	2
tomcat	8
firefox	7
libtiff	7
dhcp	1
httpd	5

Sometimes updates pass through the CentOS system quickly, but other times the performance is not quite as good; the "critical" firefox update languished for a full week.

The point of the above text is not to criticize CentOS: that project has done an outstanding job of providing a highly stable and well-supported distribution to the community for free. How can anybody criticize that? The point, instead, is that there are tradeoffs associated with any distribution choice. A Linux user who feels the need for contractually-assured service backed up by a well-funded support operation and faster security updates would be well advised to consider purchasing support from one of the companies operating in that area.

For those who do not need that level of support, instead, distributions like CentOS provide great value. A more open CentOS looks like it should be able to provide greater value yet. Also encouraging are the suggestions that CentOS could work more closely with Scientific Linux, another RHEL rebuild with very similar goals. All told, there appears to be a good chance that the recent turbulence will lead to a more solidly founded CentOS which will continue to be a firm platform for many thousands of deployed systems well into the future.

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