[CentOS] Corporate support for CentOS

Sun Mar 27 15:33:47 UTC 2011
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

On 03/27/2011 07:36 AM, Ian Murray wrote:
> 
> 
>>
>> What makes you think CentOS is not willing to be commercially sponsored?
>> (Or only work developing CentOS?)
>>
>> I would LOVE to be able to do CentOS as my only job.
>>
>> No one that we know of is willing to pay a full time salary for 1 or 2
>> or 3 people to develop CentOS.  If they would pay for it, we would
>> likely do it.
>>
>> They might be willing for us to let their current employees do some
>> CentOS things ... but not willing to pay for CentOS development.
> 
> 
> Sorry, that was just my impression from previous posts. I guess I have that wrong. Maybe I am confusing the reluctance to take donations at the moment with commercial sponsorship. Thanks for correcting me.
> 
> Couple of questions, then....
> 
> What is the average current time commitment per week, i.e. man hours that is currently volunteered by the core developers?
> 
> What would that need to increase to, to significantly reduce release times (which I think was the overall goal)?
> 
> What would the *market rate* be for the skills required? Just to give a rough figure to work with and shouldn't be related to any particular person's current day job.
> 

What the CentOS project would be interested in (from a corporate
provider) would be to hire people and allow them to do CentOS related
things.

We are not interested in being paid in addition to our current work, but
making taking care of CentOS our only work.

There are many things other than building packages that have to be
maintained for making CentOS go.  These include:

1.  We have dozens (more than 100) servers that need to be maintained in
tens of countries all world.  These machines need to be updated and
managed, including monitoring and taking corrective action for any
services that go down.

2. We have to maintain lists of update mirrors, rsync mirrors, DVD
mirrors and verify that the "Dynamic DNS list" for all these machines
stay in sync when mirrors drop out or can be added back.

3.  Manage the CentOS DNS services, the CentOS mail services, the
mailing lists, the IRC Channels, and the main website.

4.  We have to write/configure/change software to ensure our mirrors are
up-to-date and control the release of updates.  Our update system gives
out GEO-IP relevant targets for download of ISOs and updates.

5.  We have to research/answer bugs and maintain the bugs.centos.org
website.

There are many things that we could do if CentOS was our only
responsibility.

The cost to a corporate entity would be to hire one or more developers
full time and designate them to working only on the project.  If someone
were willing to do that, we would be willing to listen.

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