On Jul 30, 2009, at 9:47 AM, William Stein wrote: > Hi, > > There is an article on slashdot today about the CentOS project > admin being AWOL: > > http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/07/30/130249/CentOS-Project- > Administrator-Goes-AWOL?art_pos=4 > > "Lance Davis, the main project administrator for CentOS, a popular > free 'rebuild' of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, appears to have gone > AWOL. In an open letter from his fellow CentOS developers, they > describe the precarious situation the project has been put in. > There have been attempts to contact him for some time now, as he's > the sole administrator for the centos.org domain, the IRC channels, > and apparently, CentOS funds. One can only hope that Lance gets in > contact with them and gets things sorted out." > > One of the comments: > > "Indeed, however afaict centos is a volunteer project. When the > shit hits the fan in more important aspects of someones life then > such volunteer projects become the last thing on someones mind. > Hell for all we know he could be dead or hospitalised. > The real problem is the lack of an organisational structure that > can survive it's founder dissapearing. Sadly this is all too common > in FOSS projects. It's made worse by the fact that such projects > are usually done remotely and so often noone on the project will > know any of the person who dissapeared's real life family and > friends." > > Somebody responds: "I'm in a online TF2 clan [online video game], > and we have the Real Names, addresses, phone numbers, and work > phone numbers, of the 10 highest ranking members. The top two > members have shared all important info so a absence of one is > annoying, but completely survivable. Perhaps its because we have so > many active duty military in our group, but I would expect everyone > to take such basic precautions. Please don't tell me my TF2 group > is more organized than CentOS, (Please!)" > > ------ > > As some of you may have noticed, Sage recently had a similar > situation, in that in late May Michael Abshoff went AWOL -- he > posted one message in May that he was taking a break for a month, > and has not been heard from since. Since he was doing > essentially all release management, porting, trac account creation, > etc., we are fortunate that him going AWOL hasn't impacted the Sage > project very badly, in that with a bunch of work we were able to > adapt. That said, I think it would be really beneficial for > people involved with Sage to think through other scenarios and come > up with a way to make our project more robust. For example, what > if *I* was AWOL for a while? > I know where you live :). Actually, the physical locality of so many Seattle developers and infrastructure does somewhat mitigate many of the logistic concerns. > There are about 3-4 other people with admin privileges on most of > our hardware resources, and they are physically in the UW math > department server room (so professionally hosted and unaffected by > me being AWOL). The DNS stuff (sagemath.org) is all 100% admin'd > by me via godaddy.com, so I should find a way to fix things so that > if somebody else needs to manage the DNS stuff that is possible > (any volunteers -- Harald?). > It might make sense to put this kind of information somewhere on the hardware, either under your user or as root. That way anyone with full hardware access (enough of us) could get to it if need be. > Anyway, I would appreciate people sharing their thoughts about how > to make the Sage project more organized with respect to key people > vanishing -- either temporarily or permantly -- from the project. > If you have relevant experience with other projects, or no of good > articles about this sort of thing, etc., please share. > I think we're actually in rather good shape here in that much of the Sage community is bound together by professional academic ties (which are much higher commitment than most online volunteer projects). Most people aren't known by their online handles, but by name and affiliation (and even face due to the many Sage Days). Of course this isn't true of everyone, and will become less true as the number of contributors grows, but I think will long remain large enough to be a positive force.
- Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
