It appears that the CentOS project is languishing. There are insufficient resources to release 5.6, 6.0, and 6.1 in a timely fashion; installed servers are going unpatched. It appears from a quick health-check that the resulting attrition may prove an existential threat to the distribution. (Once I start moving everything to Debian, Ubuntu LTS, or some such, I'm probably not going to go back.)
Here's my thought on how to address resource constraints; with 100 businesses such as my own, 4-8 full-time devs could earn a decent wage, and CentOS may be able to survive.
Some reasonably sized consumers of CentOS, such as myself, have found that:
1. RHEL subscription costs are not reasonable.
2. CentOS is good enough that we run 80+ physical and virtual hosts.
3. CentOS is free. We like free. But we also recognize the value of the CentOS product to our business, and feel that our business should (and would) be willing to contribute something to the development, in particular if a release schedule can be assured. Perhaps $100 per vm/physical per year... for me, that might be $8000/yr to contribute to the project. Surely there are several more businesses that would be willing to contribute, again, for an assurance in return? A requirement of this, though, is for you to have a formal purchase order and billing process in place.
Bottom line is, my company (a very large company) does not have a process or a desire for "donation". If there's not a process for it, in a big business, it nearly can't be done. But ordering software, licenses and subscriptions, is something that happens every day as part of the regular business process.
I realize that for some devs it may be the love of the work, or a need for a good distro, or prestige more than money; but some who might be willing could jump in and help if their income were supplemented.
It's a great distro, a great product where stability is king. But we also need consistency and steadiness, or stability of lifecycle, if you will.
