CentOS is alive.
Two days after a core group of developers posted an open letter to primary admin Lance Davis, threatening to fork the open source OS if he didn't discuss his apparent disappearance from the project, Davis has answered their call - and he seems to have quelled their complaints.


"The CentOS Development team had a routine meeting today with Lance Davis in attendance," reads a new post to the project website. "During the meeting a majority of issues were resolved immediately and a working agreement was reached with deadlines for remaining unresolved issues. There should be no impact to any CentOS users going forward."

In Thursday's open letter, the developers accused Davis of putting the entire project at risk by removing himself from everyday involvement without ceding control to others. "You seem to have crawled into a hole...and this is not acceptable," the letter reads. "Please do not kill CentOS through your fear of shared management of the project."
According to the letter and various blog posts from the developers, Davis had disappeared from the project though he still maintained sole control of the CentOS domain, sole "Founders" rights in the project's IRC channels, and sole access to the project's PayPal and Google AdSense accounts.
Davis has now given up at least some of this control, though it's unclear whether he will still be involved with the open source OS, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone. "The CentOS project is now in control of the CentOS.org and CentOS.info domains and owns all trademarks, materials, and artwork in the CentOS distributions," today's post continues. "We look forward to working with Lance to quickly complete all the agreed upon issues."
Russ Herrold, the developer who penned the open letter to Davis, declined to comment on the new developments. ®