> Hi,
>
> I hope i'm allowed to ask the following question using this e-mail
> form.
>
> I personally think that CentOS is the best distro around. It gives the
> smaller, not so rich, companies (like us) a chance to use RHEL alike
> software. That's great. A like it that much that i'm even planning to
> make some community website for Dutch users .. to promote CentOS a bit
> more. Unfortunately the centos.nl domain is already taken by some
> person who doesn't use it .. and (i think) wants to sell it to a high
> bidder. So i will think of another domain-name instead.
>
> But, so far the compliments for your great work .. now .. my question:
>
> I would like to use CentOS 4.x on my webservers for production use
> (with Plesk .. so if you can influence SW-Soft to hurry up with their
> official Centos 4 support .. please do .. there is a lot of demand for
> that

. But .. i am a bit curious about the continuity of the CentOS
> project.
> Is the core-development team stable and financially supported enough ?
> Will CentOS be here for the next 5 year or so .. and will it be
> maintained with the same quality and speed as it does now ? I
> certainly hope so .. and i wish my skills were better so i could help
> out.
There are currently 10 official developers, all of which who donate their time to maintain CentOS and it's website.
We have donated servers in several places (11 in the US, 4 in the EU) for distribution of the CentOS isos and updates. We also have donated servers for building arches from some places, and the developers maintain local build machines to produce CentOS.
There really is not a financial aspect of CentOS ... we hardly have anyone who makes financial donations. Currently none of the developers are paid anything in conjunction with CentOS, but some of us are allowed to do limited development at our place of employment since our companies use CentOS.
> So maybe someone of you could tell me a bit about the current
> situation, maturity and future-plans of CentOS. In short: is it safe
> to implement on a production machine .. and will that be supported for
> some years.
>
CentOS has been around since Dec 2003.
If you take a look at our ranking at Alexa.com, you will see we rank in the top 30,000 sites on the Internet, and we are growing rapidly. We are the top EL rebuild distro at distrowatch.com.
We plan to be around forever