On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 6:23 AM, Ian Murraymurrayie@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
There is nothing wrong with the distribution itself, long may it live. My concern is that it is too reliant on individuals. A concern the devs raised themselves through the open letter. I am raising the same concern about the 'core' that the 'core' raised about Lance, that's all.
Just a few comments -- I'm not going to go on forever here. All (or almost all) community Linux distributions are reliant on a few individuals -- except for those that are backed with corporate money (Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE, etc) and (maybe) Debian. Most are controlled by one person. Look at the problems PCLinux had when its developer got sick. So, from that point of view, CentOS is on solid a solid footing.
As for updates and upgrades stopping -- I see no indication that will happen. But if we're going to look at all worst case scenarios, Red Hat could be bought out by Microsoft and mothballed, or a meteor could destroy Red Hat's headquarters. Sure that would have an impact on me -- but I would find another Linux distribution and move on.
As for getting more people to use CentOS, I don't think squabbling on a public mail list is exactly the best way to do that.