The following has been posted at centos.org:

July 30, 2009 04:39 UTC

This is an Open Letter to Lance Davis from fellow CentOS Developers

It is regrettable that we are forced to send this letter but we are 
left with no other options. For some time now we have been attempting 
to resolve these problems:

You seem to have crawled into a hole ... and this is not acceptable.

You have long promised a statement of CentOS project 
funds; to this date this has not appeared.

You hold sole control of the centos.org domain with no 
deputy; this is not proper.

You have, it seems, sole 'Founders' rights in the IRC channels 
with no deputy ; this is not proper.

When I (Russ) try to call the phone numbers for UK Linux, and for 
you individually, I get a telco intercept 'Lines are temporarily busy' 
for the last two weeks. Finally yesterday, a voicemail in your voice 
picked up, and I left a message urgently requesting a reply. Karanbir 
also reports calling and leaving messages without your reply.

Please do not kill CentOS through your fear of shared management of 
the project.

Clearly the project dies if all the developers walk away.

Please contact me, or any other signer of this letter at once, to 
arrange for the required information to keep the project alive at 
the 'centos.org' domain.

Sincerely,

Russ Herrold
Ralph Angenendt
Karanbir Singh
Jim Perrin
Donavan Nelson
Tim Verhoeven
Tru Huynh
Johnny Hughes

This is a huge problem. Lance Davis is apparently the only guy with some of the "keys to the castle." It's hard to believe that a widely deployed operating system community did not have a plan for something like this. Posting a letter like this on the main page of the website only makes the CentOS team look foolish. However, they did post some facts on the same page explaining they have a contingency plan, and updates for CentOS could still be obtained if they have to move to a new domain by installing a new RPM package. This however, requires installing this patch across 100,000+ servers. Not Cool. I have countless CentOS servers running on production servers and to see something like this just makes sick. Hopefully Lance has not been hurt and has a reasonable explanation. This strangely happened the same day Alan Cox dis-tastefully announced he would no longer maintain the Linux TTY subsystem. What is going on in the Linux community these days?