Open Source Design in risk?

Stylissimo writes "OSWD.org, the biggest source for free open source web templates, has been offline for several weeks, which has caused a dilemma for the large number of webmasters who rely on open source design. While some of the OSWD.org designers are doing their best to keep the open source design scene alive, others are worried that the absence of OSWD.org will hit the internet hard and maybe even kill the scene. Aaron Nikula, administrator of OSWD.org, has published a statement about the situation and the site may be back again."

Comments

For once

[tomhudson]

... its NOT the slashdot effect

OSWD will be back shortly. We are experiencing technical difficulties.

Re:For once

[Will2k_is_here]

Oh, the site is down. Here's a google cache

Re:For once

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try, Google's updated the cache...it's got 'back soon' page now.

Re:For once

[Will2k_is_here]

Good Lord! Somebody stripped out your humor module?

Re:For once

[EDOX25]

Mine is still there. That was funny!

Re:For once

[AstronomicUID]

# rmmod humor
ERROR: Module humor does not exist in /proc/modules
#

Re:For once

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because you made a typo

# rmmod humour
#

Re:For once

[Anonymous Coward]

  That's because you made a typo

# rmmod humour
#

Only a dipshit Brit or Canadian would call that a typo

Learn how to spell "humor" you stupid cunt, and go fuck yourself

I can't believe this

[RootsLINUX]

They're already having trouble getting their site back up, and then you decide to go and slashdot them? Good lord, have you no sense of decency???

Re:I can't believe this

[Overly Critical Guy]

This is the site that has the capability to cache links and not destroy people's bandwidth fees but just won't do it. Decency? Ha, you're asking the wrong people.

Re:I can't believe this

[IamLarryboy]

Their server is going down hard. Here is the text.

***

Hello everyone, I'm Aaron "MonkeyMan" Nikula, I've been running OSWD for the past 3 years, so here's your authoritative explanation.

On Oct 13th our site was displaying a "Forbidden" error. We tried to contact our host (phpwebhosting.com), but despite our "emergency" support ticket it took them a week to reply to it and they do not have a phone support number. Turns out they had attempted to contact us through an email address that Frank used to create an account years ago. After all that was sorted out it turns out they disabled our account because the website was crashing their server. They have 196 users on that machine, 92 mysqld threads, and 33 apache threads, so I think we just used up too many resources for a shared (and cheap) host.

Regardless, none of that has anything to do with the problems we're having now. A little bit of OSWD history first. OSWD was started by Frank Skettino about 4 years ago. I joined 1 month after the project was created (before we even had the OSWD.org domain) and that's when I started writing PHP code for the project. After a while (months) Frank started doing less and less and I started picking up slack. I think I've written 95% of the code that was running the website. I also maintained the website. About 50% of the designs were approved by me, 45% by various volunteers (Josh, Josh, Locke, and Skatters to name a few), and 5% were done by Frank in the early days. In fact, when I had to take a trip and was away from the internet for about 4 months, nobody maintained the site. There were hundreds of designs in the queue and nobody approved them until I got back. I also started the OSWD design contests, in fact (as Josh mentioned) we were in the middle of one when the site went down.

After OSWD started to gain some steam Frank decided to add our first commercial venture. He added the template monster affiliate program to the website. It has been criticized in the past by our members because it's not open source and people confused them with our free designs. I think it's worth noting that he never told anyone how much money he made and he didn't share the money. He was paying for the hosting, so I was fine with that (although our hosting cost was $10/month, I can assure you he was making more than that).

So, back to the present: all these things were making me upset. When the site went down I thought it would be a nice time to ask Frank to pass the website to me for the benefit of the project. He hasn't talked to me since. Also, I don't have access to OSWD or access to my email account. OSWD DOES have new hosting, the transfer was done 2 weeks ago. The problem is that Frank won't do the work to bring it back up. There are no technical problems anymore, he's just sitting on it. Also, he won't give the project to anyone else to do it for him, I think because he wants to keep as much control on the website as possible.

So that's what's happening guys. I really appreciate all the offers of hosting, but that's not the issue here. And really, unless Frank gives up the website, there's not a whole lot I can do help. Hope that clears things up!

Re:I can't believe this

[autophile]

Wouldn't this be an appropriate time to tell Frank to "fork you"?

--Rob

Re:I can't believe this

[Anonymous Coward]

Because caching would violate copyrights *AND* steal ad revenue...

Re:I can't believe this

[FLEB]

You know, it seems like this is a perfect place for a "robots.txt" type of solution for mirroring. Something detailing whether mirroring is allowed, whether mirrorers should mirror onsite/offsite/specific links on the page, etc.

Seems like survival of the fittest.

[chroot_james]

I suspect they're in trouble because they're not performing a valuable enough service. Linux never has trouble finding funding because it's so valuable to people that Linux stay in healthy shape. I've taken a look through OSWD before and found most of the sites were ugly. Not only that, they wouldn't adapt well to a site design I have in mind.

So it goes.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Karma_fucker_sucker]

I suspect they're in trouble because they're not performing a valuable enough service.

I've never even heard of them until today. Maybe it's an exposure problem i.e. Not enough?

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[ergo98]

I suspect they're in trouble because they're not performing a valuable enough service.

Is it really a funding problems? Sounds more like a lame technical screw up soap opera.

Why is this on Slashdot? Some random site has some problems, and that gets a Slashdot front-page story? The fact that they have "open source" in their name doesn't quite merit it. And I love the popup-prevention-circumvention popups at the forum link included in the submission. Nice.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Karma_fucker_sucker]

Why is this on Slashdot?

The editors needed an article so that they can keep'em coming every 30 minutes or so.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[hobo sapiens]

I will agree. Web site templates SUCK big time. I mean, if you cannot design a web site, then what are you doing trying to produce one? Also, isn't designing them the fun part? Worst of all, these idiotic templates are often full of bloated code and bad stock photos that lend nothing to the product except to make it look "professional". Good riddance. Replace it with a website on how to design usable web sites. And tutorials on how to never use a stock photo again.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Wornstrom]

from the statement:
After OSWD started to gain some steam Frank decided to add our first commercial venture. He added the template monster affiliate program to the website. It has been criticized in the past by our members because it's not open source and people confused them with our free designs. I think it's worth noting that he never told anyone how much money he made and he didn't share the money. He was paying for the hosting, so I was fine with that (although our hosting cost was $10/month, I can assure you he was making more than that). So, back to the present: all these things were making me upset. When the site went down I thought it would be a nice time to ask Frank to pass the website to me for the benefit of the project. He hasn't talked to me since. Also, I don't have access to OSWD or access to my email account. OSWD DOES have new hosting, the transfer was done 2 weeks ago. The problem is that Frank won't do the work to bring it back up. There are no technical problems anymore, he's just sitting on it. Also, he won't give the project to anyone else to do it for him, I think because he wants to keep as much control on the website as possible. So that's what's happening guys. I really appreciate all the offers of hosting, but that's not the issue here. And really, unless Frank gives up the website, there's not a whole lot I can do help. Hope that clears things up!

sounds like the one guy Frank is being greedy and lazy, doesn't want to lose his affiliate cash, or do the work to get the site back up.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[knipknap]

You might want to RTFA. The problem is not about the funding or technical issues, it is about a webmaster who does not want to give up control:

The problem is that Frank won't do the work to bring it back up. There are no technical problems anymore, he's just sitting on it. Also, he won't give the project to anyone else to do it for him, I think because he wants to keep as much control on the website as possible.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[chroot_james]

If people cared enough, a replacement would pop up. That was my point.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Jon Peterson]

Well, it sounds to me like someone wants to retain control of their website that they paid for. Big deal.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[OverlordQ]

If you Google for "Web Design" they come up as #4 for me.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[tomhudson]

If you had read the article, you'd have seen that apparently, the guy who registered the domain a few years ago, and is now out of the picture, doesn't want to turn over the domain to the people who have been doing the heavy lifting for the last while.

Moral of the story - if you're doing a lot of work on something, make sure the contact info is up to date, or you can end up having your work "hijacked".

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Maestro4k]

If people cared enough, a replacement would pop up. That was my point. It probably will, but at this time no one but the guy holding OSWD in stasis has access to any of the files. It'll take a while to recreate the site from scratch so a replacement can't just "pop up" in this case. I'm sure the rest of the OSWD community will build a new site but it won't have as many templates as the old site for quite some time.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[poot_rootbeer]

I suspect they're in trouble because they're not performing a valuable enough service.

The cut-n-pasted statement in an above comment seems to suggest that they're in trouble because they're using more than their fair share of the shared hosting resources (according to the hosting company). This would seem to contraindicate the idea that not enough people are finding value in what they offer.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[hobo sapiens]

Whomever just modded me down as flamebait -- you probably did that because on your last consulting job where you got PAID to design a website, you went to this site and grabbed a nifty template. It worked out too, since executives don't care about bad code and they just LOVE stock photos, especially ones of second rate models in corporate attire giving a laptop a steely stare. Plus the website probably plays sounds and all kinds of "kewl" stuff. I have seen it too many times in my professional experience.

Website templates are bad. I do not use generalities like this too often, but in this case it is merited. If you cannot design a website, or know enough to hire someone who can, then "resources" like this one will not cover your ineptitude. If you are a good programmer but cannot design well, ask for help. Learn how. Don't take a template and use it. By the time you make it fit your needs, you could have learned something. Better yet, let form follow function. Google should prove to everyone that if it works fast and well, it doesn't gotta be pretty.

There, that felt good.

Now THAT'S quality flamebait. Fire away, hosers.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Paradise Pete]

It probably will, but at this time no one but the guy holding OSWD in stasis has access to any of the files.

You don't think there's an off-site copy anywhere?

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Threni]

>Why is this on Slashdot? Some random site has some problems, and that gets a Slashdot
>front-page story?

Every story on Slashdot is a front-page story, isn't it? It *is* news for nerds, and I'm sure it'll get more comments than a lot of stories that I'd agree are more worthy. But Cheggers can't be boozers...

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every story on Slashdot is a front-page story, isn't it?

No. Take a look at any of the sections (they are listed under 'Sections' in the left hand navigation bar). You'll see plenty of stories which didn't make it onto the front page.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[robertjw]

If you Google for "Web Design" they come up as #4 for me.

Thing is, every time I look for templates I search for 'web templates', 'css templates' or something of that nature. I wouldn't search 'Web Design' unless I was actually looking for a web designer, thus I've never heard of them either, until today.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Omestes]

Usually when I want to maintain control of something, I actively develop and/or manage it. I'm sure Aaron[?] would be okay with the site just going back up, since it seems he was happy doing all the work with none of the material pay-off before.

I agree with the parent, Frank seems to just be being rather lazy and negligent, being that he refuses to fork over the (OS) project to Aaron but also refuses to do any work on his own. He should give a catagorical "NO!", and then DO SOMETHING, or cede all costs and reponsibilities to Aaron while keeping his for profit project for himself. By doing nothing we can draw no conclusions, but it also impedes a decent resource from everyone for no reason, when it could be up, albeit under someone else.

My question is why doesn't he just fork it to his new host, if he has been maintaining it he should have some form of backup or previous version stored locally (if not, shame on him!), and for the code itself, he shouldn't have much of a problem securing from other sources again, and/or asking for donations. And if Frank brings the original site up, then he will (from the sound of it) be in a bad place being that he does no actual work.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Omestes]

I mostly agree with you, so no flame here, perhaps its just how you originally put it.

I have used templates before, but going with the OS model, I HEAVILY modify them for my own ends, until they are pretty much nothing like what they started as. And actually that is how I cut my teeth on HTML/design is finding the design I wanted, looking at the source, and ripping it apart until it does what I want. Only after that did I develop an aesthetic and style for myself.

Its like art classes, first you study art learn about it, only then can you create it. Same thing with lit, first you must read, and the more you read, the better you can write. (ditto with my area, philosophy).

Right now I'm working on a new personal/porfolio page, and wouldn't mind grabbing a template for it, if only as the spark of inspiration from which I can shape it, and modify it, or even throw it out because I can do better.

To claim that templates are worthless is a bit flame-baity in that sense, being that plenty of people can get use from them, without being creatively bankrupt, but only if they don't let it sit as is.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[HeyBob!]

Websites based on templates!?! No wonder most of the internet looks similar...

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Maestro4k]

You don't think there's an off-site copy anywhere? The post by Aaron Nikula linked from the /. summary doesn't seem to indicate there is one, or if there is only Frank (the guy holding things in stasis) is the only one with access to it. His message is pretty clear: OSWD won't be coming back up until Frank either does the necessary work or allows someone else to do so.

Now all the individual contributors likely have copies of their templates and many people may have at least a handful they downloaded but it would still take a while to rebuild that way.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[hackwrench]

But they didn't pay for all of it. A website is composed of three things:
1. Domain Name
2. Hosting
3. Content

He paid for the first two, but he didn't pay for the latter, and it is the latter that makes the first one valuable. Legally he may have obligations to the providers of the content regarding the domain name.

I am not a lawyer, but I am basing my statement on what I learned in a Business Law class that was taught by a prosecuting attorney.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[tomhudson]

Need inspiration?

Go or here

Lots of css goodness, examples, downloadable stuff, etc.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[tomhudson]

Frig - I screwed up the first link. My bad http://www.csszengarden.com/

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Maestro4k]

If you cannot design a website, or know enough to hire someone who can, then "resources" like this one will not cover your ineptitude. If you are a good programmer but cannot design well, ask for help. Learn how. Don't take a template and use it. By the time you make it fit your needs, you could have learned something. As someone who just had to make a new website for my employer in a rather short time period (3 weeks) using software I'd never used before (Joomla, used to be called Mambo) I can tell you that there are indeed times where taking an existing template and modifying it is quite necessary. Of course I wasn't hired as a web designer and the last time I designed a site was well before cascading style sheets were around.

As for learning something, well yes I did, and I did it by going through the template's PHP and CSS files and methodically figuring out what sections affected the site's look. Mostly this was done with the CSS file since the PHP file was short and sweet. I picked a template with the basic layout we wanted for the site to start with, that saved some time. After I was done I had a far better understanding of CSS and PHP (I've not had cause to use PHP before either). I probably _could_ design a new site from scratch now, but not before.

Frankly I learn much faster using a real working example and modifying it. Not only does the template fit our needs I learned quite a lot. It also prepared me for the task of making the ExtCalendar component and Mini-Cal module match the site. Those use seperate style sheets of their own and had minimal documentation (or meaningful element names) for what styles modified what. It took me 6 hours of trial and error on each one simply to find out what each element modified and then change it. I also commented up the style sheet as I went and will be contributing it back to the project since it's open source. (It's also still a beta which is likely why the style sheets aren't easy to modify yet. In fact the Mini-Cal used an inline style sheet originally, now it uses an external one.)

So there you go, a case where using a template was not only necessary, using it lead to my learning quite a bit and even a contribution to an open source project. I had to modify the PHP code for the mini-cal a bit as well and more needs to be done. I'll be taking some time at work over the next few weeks to make some more substantial mods (basically allowing finer control over the appearance of the mini-cal, this will help make modifying its appearance far easier in the future) and contributing that as well.

But yeah, Website templates are bad right?

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[estebanf]

Actually the content was provided by the community that shared their designs, not aaron or frank. Aaron is just a lazy web master that don't want to start a new project by himself, and Frank is too busy making a deposit of the profits. This is just a crappy fight between 2 boyfriends. It's only on slashdot because it has the "open source" stamp on it... I will get an OS tatoo on my butt just to check if I can get to the /. frontpage.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[baadger]

It's on slashdot because there is a huge overlap between web geeks (mostly PHP,Perl,Ruby scripters) and /.ers. Alot of these web geeks tend to have poor web design skills (just click on alot of the commenters homepage links and you will see), hence the need for web templates.

Quite frankly OSWD.org was/is the best free web template website i've found. It has/had a nice little community, an neat interface and creative contributors who actually cared about standards like XHTML and CSS.

You insensitive clod.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[hobo sapiens]

Fair enough. I guess learning from templates is OK.

However, while *you* may do this, I have seen "professional" web developers present templates to comittees and the take the credit. Meanwhile, the design is full of crap stock photos code bloat. Of course, these same people get upset when you ask why they have seven layers of nested tables to lay out a page and spacer gifs and stuff like that. Yeah, that stuff was a cool hack back when html did not support style sheets, but now it's just plain bad practice. I have never seen templates that were constructed of what could be called great code. I have not seen everything, so I cannot say that this is the case everywhere, but I'd bet that's pretty close to the truth. Someone prove me wrong here...

Anyhow, the other half of the reason I replied was to commend you on your Orz sig. Awesome! I thought I was the only one who still dug that game...

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[hobo sapiens]

I can appreciate your point, but I still don't like 'em. Just my opinion. Learning from them is cool. Using them is oh-so-lame.

I design web applications for a living, and I have never seen a great template. I have not seen everything under the sun, of course. I can only speak from my own experience.


Hey moderators! Don't forget to mark this as flame bait too!

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Web templates" #10

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Omestes]

In every profession or area you will find unoriginal wankers reusing antiquated ideas. We probably could pick on much of the OSS community for reusing clunky outdated codes, instead of comeing up with a better (original) method.

Have you downloaded the 3DO port of SCII? It makes me feel young again, sadly it doesn't have the huge honking map of hyperspace/space.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[MikeFM]

Making a good template for a site is not easy and not especially fun. Making one that uses CSS for more than changing your fonts and make it work in all major browsers and you've just been through hell. IE is seriously a nightmare to do thanks largely to it's lack of proper transparency support and lack of positioning support.

Most site's need only the graphics and colors of their template changed from one of maybe three basic designs so it makes sense to reuse most of that code and to just change what needs to be changed. If you go with a design other than those basic three then I hope you know what you're doing because user's do best with a user-interface that behaves in a way they expect. Trying to do something new and different in UI design is rarely a good idea.

I'll agree that most stock templates I've seen have been crude and poorly designed. They're usually designed by people with experience in graphic arts or HTML but no experience in UI design. Flash templates especially annoy me as they waste a lot of energy on looking fancy without actually making the site even as easy to use as a normal HTML page. It's more of a problem of the designers lack of experience than a problem with the concept of templates though.

How many MAJOR websites have you used that use Javascript links. That annoys the crap out of me because it is so needless and is a usability nightmare. It's easy enough to use normal links and then add Javascript behaviors to them if you want them to do something different for browsers that have Javascript support. The Javascript code is usually cleaner if you assign it as a behavior anyway. There is absolutely no reason to ever use a Javascript link. It's no wonder designers create such crap with major sites doing that sort of lazy work.

Stock photos are fine for templates and mockups. It's the responsibility of whomever turns them into a finished site to exchange stock photos for custom photos.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[hobo sapiens]

You talking about UR Quan masters? Heck yeah! It has to be one of the greatest games ever! You can get all kinds of maps at classicgaming.com (I'd find the exact URI for you except I am at work and I'd get yelled at). It has maps of hyperspace, alien home worlds, even maps of planets with good supplies of minerals. It's more fun without the cheats, but it's still cool to have if you need it.

Re:Seems like survival of the fittest.

[Bogtha]

You don't think there's an off-site copy anywhere?

The post by Aaron Nikula linked from the /. summary doesn't seem to indicate there is one

Apparently he does have a copy.

Never heard of it. Have you?

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt it will affect the "open source design scene" whatever that is. Are we just talking about free web layouts or actual code? Seems there are many alternative sites that will continue to provide such goodies.

Re:Never heard of it. Have you?

[waterwheel]

Calling this an OSS project is misleading at best. Yes they have some free/opensource templates. But the biggest push on that site, and certainly any of their decent looking templates are NOT opensource. You gotta pay to play, no distribution rights, etc. In short, it's a commercial site that's trying to make money with an OS front. (to clarify, they're not making money off of OSS, they're calling their site OS, but offering primarily commerical products). And guess what....now they've got their knickers in a knot over who's making the cash!

Reprint of the forum post from the original article:

Hello everyone, I'm Aaron "MonkeyMan" Nikula, I've been running OSWD for the past 3 years, so here's your authoritative explanation.

On Oct 13th our site was displaying a "Forbidden" error. We tried to contact our host (phpwebhosting.com), but despite our "emergency" support ticket it took them a week to reply to it and they do not have a phone support number. Turns out they had attempted to contact us through an email address that Frank used to create an account years ago. After all that was sorted out it turns out they disabled our account because the website was crashing their server. They have 196 users on that machine, 92 mysqld threads, and 33 apache threads, so I think we just used up too many resources for a shared (and cheap) host.

Regardless, none of that has anything to do with the problems we're having now. A little bit of OSWD history first. OSWD was started by Frank Skettino about 4 years ago. I joined 1 month after the project was created (before we even had the OSWD.org domain) and that's when I started writing PHP code for the project. After a while (months) Frank started doing less and less and I started picking up slack. I think I've written 95% of the code that was running the website. I also maintained the website. About 50% of the designs were approved by me, 45% by various volunteers (Josh, Josh, Locke, and Skatters to name a few), and 5% were done by Frank in the early days. In fact, when I had to take a trip and was away from the internet for about 4 months, nobody maintained the site. There were hundreds of designs in the queue and nobody approved them until I got back. I also started the OSWD design contests, in fact (as Josh mentioned) we were in the middle of one when the site went down.

After OSWD started to gain some steam Frank decided to add our first commercial venture. He added the template monster affiliate program to the website. It has been criticized in the past by our members because it's not open source and people confused them with our free designs. I think it's worth noting that he never told anyone how much money he made and he didn't share the money. He was paying for the hosting, so I was fine with that (although our hosting cost was $10/month, I can assure you he was making more than that).

So, back to the present: all these things were making me upset. When the site went down I thought it would be a nice time to ask Frank to pass the website to me for the benefit of the project. He hasn't talked to me since. Also, I don't have access to OSWD or access to my email account. OSWD DOES have new hosting, the transfer was done 2 weeks ago. The problem is that Frank won't do the work to bring it back up. There are no technical problems anymore, he's just sitting on it. Also, he won't give the project to anyone else to do it for him, I think because he wants to keep as much control on the website as possible.

So that's what's happening guys. I really appreciate all the offers of hosting, but that's not the issue here. And really, unless Frank gives up the website, there's not a whole lot I can do help. Hope that clears things up!

Re:Never heard of it. Have you?

[smallguy78]

From the looks of their templates, the public isn't missing much. Verdana with blocky table like templates. Maybe I'm just use to paying a designer.

the beauty of geekness

[Turn-X Alphonse]

If someone did died (permantly or not) it will be replaced as soon as it needs to be. Geeks tend to like to have tools ready when they need them. So if one is missing theopen source geeks will start to work on it. No matter the name or brand everything will return from it's death in some form.

Re:the beauty of geekness

[khoury.brazil]

My god, I think the parent post just gave me an aneurysm.

Re:the beauty of geekness

[blippy]

If someone did died (permantly or not) it will be replaced as soon as it needs to be. Geeks tend to like to have tools ready when they need them. So if one is missing theopen source geeks will start to work on it. No matter the name or brand everything will return from it's death in some form.

My god, I think the parent post just gave me an aneurysm.

If you die, I hope it will be nothing permanent.

If they are so important.

[DAldredge]

If they are so important why doesn't Slashdots parent company host them?

Re:If they are so important.

[eclectro]

If you RTFA hosting is not the issue. It's the guy who owns the domain OSWD.org that wants to disenfranchise everyone, though he really has done nothing to provide content for the site.

Re:If they are so important.

[kmmatthews]

A. They aren't.
B. They don't need hosting.
C. Why don't you try reading the article once or twice?

Re:If they are so important.

[eno2001]

Come on dude! This is Slashdot! Where's the fun in reading an article before posting uninformed flambait/trolls? Where's your sense of community? ;P

Re:If they are so important.

[Jesus_666]

He must be new here...

Hit the Internet hard? Oh, come on...

[madman101]

others are worried that the absence of OSWD.org will hit the internet hard

I doubt anyone will really notice.

Re:Hit the Internet hard? Oh, come on...

[xanadu113]

Being as I hadn't noticed it before, will anyone notice? I've been using open source software for web design for years, without OSWD.org..

If anyone is curious as to what WAS there, you can go to this address and see all the previous versions of it by entering it's URL:

Internet Archives

At least we have an explaination now....

[haplo21112]

...I've been wondering. The site has been very valuable to me for several months now...infact it had become part of my daily, check this site for new stuff rotation. Hopefully they can resolve whatever dispute is keeping them offline soon, or the remaining interested parties will start a new site to replace it.

Unfortunately its sounding rather like greed has reared up in the wake of the disaster...

Re:At least we have an explaination now....

[kmmatthews]

I wouldn't say greed has reared up - the greed has _always_ been there. This prick (Frank) has always been making money from everyone elses work; now that the site needs to be moved to a different host, the guy is just plain too fucking lazy to do it, and too controlling to let anyone else do it.

IMO, something new needs to be started from scratch, without Frank being involved AT ALL.

Re:At least we have an explaination now....

[tomhudson]

Why not just go here instead?

Really nice shit!

Re:At least we have an explaination now....

[Bogtha]

Don't copy CSS Zen Garden designs. The images aren't open-source, you can't redistribute them freely, they are covered by copyright. Read the FAQ:

You may not use any of the graphics (image files: GIF, JPG, and PNG) on the Zen Garden elsewhere without the original designer's written permission. There are no exceptions to this. The Garden is about learning from other people's work, but not using it uncompensated.

Re:At least we have an explaination now....

[tomhudson]

If you read further, you'll see that they encourage people to release their designs under the creative commons. Some do, some don't. Either way, the idea isn't to rip of the designer - its' to get inspiration, useful ideas, etc., and see how you can use the techniques in your own designs. I should have made that clear. Thanks for pointing it out.

Re:At least we have an explaination now....

[Bogtha]

If you read further, you'll see that they encourage people to release their designs under the creative commons.

To be completely clear, the CSS is under a creative commons license, but not the entire designs. It's fine for somebody to copy an oswd.org design completely, but not to do the same with a CSS Zen Garden design. People have done that in the past, and it has resulted in designers removing their designs from the CSS Zen Garden.

Re:At least we have an explaination now....

[tomhudson]

I would hope people would get the idea from the name and content - zen - sit there and contemplate the possibilities of css - and when they are elightened, proceed with their own design.

Just ripping off someone else's stuff is low, and really, rather pointless in the long run. No creativity. Nothing to be proud of.

It isn't about lack of hosting it is about greed

[JaseOne]

If you actually read the linked article (yeah I know that is a lot to expect around here and all that) then you will find out the problem isn't the lack of hosting it is that the founder seems to be holding the site ransom without actually posting a ransom but it seems like he wishes to make the site more comercial.

But open source means...

[Phoenix]

If it is an open source movement and the web site is dead with the possibility of it never going up again, is it not in the realm of possibility that others will pick up the pieces and do another one?

Isn't that the point of Open Source? The ability that others can take the source and do with it as they wish as long as the results are also open source?

The death of a web site doesn't mean the death of the OSWD community...unless no one cares and they all let it die.

Phoenix

Re:But open source means...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. If it was worthwhile, someone will make it happen in some form again. As for your interpretation of "Open Source", it's incredibly narrow.

Re:But open source means...

[_Sprocket_]

If it is an open source movement and the web site is dead with the possibility of it never going up again, is it not in the realm of possibility that others will pick up the pieces and do another one?

It seems that it should be possible. But it won't be easy without cooperation. And since the site owner doesn't seem keen to help create a site to supplant his, that cooperation is not forthcoming. This leaves those who wish to "pick up the pieces" with two distinct challenges.

The first challenge is replicating the content. This is certainly possible to do - a vast majority of the content seems to have come from the community. The site designs are probably sitting on hard drives of the developers and users right now. The problem is getting those who currently have copies to get around to resubmitting them. And that leads to the greatest challenge; network effect.

The users of OSWD all know about OSWD. It serves as a focus point for those who wish to publish works and those interested in finding those works. The more people who use this site, the more effective (and valuable) it becomes. More users means a larger audience to publish to and more publishers means a larger pool of content to select from. Anyone wishing to create a replacement will have to get the word out about their new site and convince people to begin using it instead of OSWD. Most of these types of sites gain popularity over time so a new replacement will likely have to wait some time before it's built up the same network effect value as OSWD.

That's not to say it can't happen, or shouldn't be done. There are quite a lot of examples of forked projects. And it helps if a significant portion of the community agrees on the fork and follows on to the replacement. A "good", or otherwise popular, fork will tend to form with a significantly larger network effect than those who begin from scratch. Which, in turn, helps get the word out and leads to a faster recovery (even if the original project remains and leads to a somewhat fractured community).

Nice advertisement

[Idaho]

Wow, someone managed to mention 'oswd.org' four times in as little as three sentences and still get it posted to slashdot!

Good marketing job, I must admit :)

OK so this is offtopic, but honestly...what exactly is 'news' about some site that I doubt many people here have even heard of being offline for a few weeks?

Re:Nice advertisement

[jafiwam]

Did you click on the link retard?

It says right there in the article summary the site is down and has been a while. That's not advertising.... it's something else... dunno.. maybe NEWS?

Wiping your ass is a conspiracy of the paper-making industry too. It has nothing to do with not smelling like shiat all the time.

Clearing up some misconceptions

[AnomalyConcept]

I know this is Slashdot, where no one bothers to read the articles, but after reading roughly 10 comments that were speculation (and completely incorrect based on the information presented in the links), I decided I had to steer the discussion back on track. Mod me down if you want.

The reason (as stated in the articles) why OSWD.org is down is because the person that started the OSWD.org site, Frank, is trying to keep control over the site, although he isn't doing the majority of the work behind mantaining the site.

Sure, OSWD.org had some hosting issues, but that's not why the site isn't back up; the (seems to me) Second in Command, Aaron, who is dedicating a lot of time and effort into maintaining the site wants to migrate the site to a new host (and has already had everthing set up), except for the content/backups, which Frank refuses to provide.

There are some controversial issues:
After OSWD.org gained some popularity in the beginnings, Frank added a "commercial venture" to the site, the 'templat e monster affiliate program', which was non-free. Aaron's concerns is that it was confusing people and because it was non-free.

I think the issue here is more of "what happens if the project leader is unwilling to provide the content (or source code) for a project, and wants to maintain it tightly within their grasp?" I know the common first reaction would be to say "Fork it!", but how can you fork if you don't have the content or source? OSWD.org (presumably) has has a lot of templates submitted, for which a second backup copy may or may not exist. // If there's already another response like this, I apologize. It took me a while to write this.

DISCLAIMER: I am not affiliated with OSWD.org, nor do I remember having visited them in the past. I may have, but all information above is from the articles linked, namely http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showpost.php?p=226 5475&postcount=40.

Re:Clearing up some misconceptions

[chriseyre2000]

The ability (and right) to fork a project is almost part of the definition of an open-source project. If you can't get at the content start over somewhere else and ask for donations again. The more popular ones must have been downloaded somewhere.

Re:Clearing up some misconceptions

[Anthony Boyd]

The reason (as stated in the articles) why OSWD.org is down is because the person that started the OSWD.org site, Frank, is trying to keep control over the site, although he isn't doing the majority of the work behind mantaining the site.

I run a few sites that get "maintained" by other people. It is bizarre to me that some /. readers apparently think it is reasonable that someone else would eventually have rights to my site simply because they maintained the data for a while. Is that some kind of unspoken agreement that site owners have unknowingly entered into? Is every forum in the world eventually going to be owned by the moderators? Is every code repository going to be owned by patch submitters? Should we have rights to /. because we've posted comments?

I haven't been able to read the article -- the links I've clicked on have been Slashdotted. However, I've not clicked them all, and I'm hopeful that there is more to it than just "OMG! The guy who created it won't cede it to the guy who works on it!"

I'm not saying I don't believe in sweat equity. That's a very real, legitimate thing. But both sides have to agree to what that is worth. If Frank felt the sweat equity was worth nothing, and Aaron didn't bother to find that out until now, then I'd say shame on Aaron, not shame on Frank.

Re:Clearing up some misconceptions

[Artful Codger]

...Sure, OSWD.org had some hosting issues, but that's not why the site isn't back up; the (seems to me) Second in Command, Aaron, who is dedicating a lot of time and effort into maintaining the site wants to migrate the site to a new host (and has already had everthing set up), except for the content/backups, which Frank refuses to provide.

Speaking personally, for any project that I was #2 on AND for which I was doing most of the maintenance... I'd have a complete local set of files, and/or my own set of backup files. Just sayin'.

Re:Clearing up some misconceptions

[slackmaster2000]

I've been in this position before.

I was the only administrative-level moderator at a very popular website for several years. I also produced two successful commercial products for the site, and helped work on many new ideas.

There was a problem, though. The site owner was a frequent no show. In fact, for the last couple years I was there he was virtually invisible...only popping up from time time to restart the server. He wouldn't respond to emails, even from me. He wouldn't respond to user requests or ideas, even when they were filtered through myself or other moderators. He wouldn't back up moderator decisions and the whole site turned very chaotic. He basically just disappeared.

So there was a dilema. Yes, he owned the site and it was his to do with as he pleased. However, the vast majority of the content was produced by volunteers and users.

The solution?

I got in touch with another guy from the site who I felt was trustworthy and we started a small business partnership and started our own website dealing with the same exact subject matter. Since we were members of the original site since its beginning (or nearly), we ended up "stealing" a ton of its users. There were of course big moral debates and a lot of hot heads but it cooled off after six months or so. We just recently passed our two year mark and while the original site has like 30,000 members and millions of forum posts, we only have about 3,000 members and a quarter million posts...but that's ok because it's operating the way we want it to, and that's what it's all about. Our business model is successful too in that we haven't had to pay our high server fees out of pocket since the second month of operation. The original site didn't have a successful model of operation, it all depends on that one invisible guy to fund it with donations and advertising, neither of which are reliable sources of income.

So one lesson learned: if you're willing to volunteer a huge amount of time for a project you believe in when somebody else is going to reap the tangible benefits, and then the project turns to shit.... maybe it's YOUR turn to go for it. You've already got the know-how and the drive after all. You don't need a terribly "unique" idea for a website either, there is a lot of room for good competition out there, which benefits everyone (as long as you're not doing anything slimey).

Another lesson I didn't expect to learn: about a year ago I went through a very unexpected divorce, and suddenly my priorities shifted drastically. I went from putting probably 30-40 hours a week into my project to putting maybe a few hours a month into it. I suddenly understood things a lot better from that other owner's perspective...I didn't want to respond to emails...I didn't want to fix things...I didn't want to take care of anything, it just felt like a burden, but one that I couldn't let go of because it was my baby. Anyhow, the last couple months have been much better and I'm not sure I learned any specific lesson except perhaps some tolerance and understanding.

Re:Clearing up some misconceptions

[budgenator]

Aaron by his statement wrote most of the php code that ran, and perhaps crashed the site. That means that he had the user name and password for the site, and the user name and password for the database; because if your writing code for a website eventualy you have to upload the code to the website so you have FTP access bothways, and for the database

mysqldump -hyourmachine.phpwebhosting.com -uUsername -pPasswd OSWD >DatabaseBackUp.sql

works wonders. I've used phpwebhosting in the past and you can connect to the MySQL server from outside, once some test code on my local machine, was still connecting to the database on the production site, that one took me a while to figure out :(. If your going to do the work, you better do the back-ups either before you upload or after. phpwebhosting was unresponsive to me also, they wouldn't even answer an email that said, "where can I send you a check?" !

Re:Clearing up some misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were spending 30 to 40 hours on a website, perhaps the divorce shouldn't've been so unexpected.

Re:Clearing up some misconceptions

[vanyel]

We just recently passed our two year mark and while the original site has like 30,000 members and millions of forum posts, we only have about 3,000 members and a quarter million posts

If the original site has 10 times the users and traffic 2 years later, it doesn't sound as broke as it's being made out to be. Still, the point is valid: with open source, if you don't like the way something's being done, you're free to do it your own way...

Re:Clearing up some misconceptions

[LetterJ]

But, without access to change the DNS settings to point to the new site, you've just got a clone of a site on a new address. You can take a copy of Slashdot's code and content, but as long as everyone keeps linking to slashdot.org, you don't have "the site".

Re:Clearing up some misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't just maintain the site. I wrote the db and the code. All Frank provided was a name.

Coral Cache of Nikula's statement

[Frankie70]

http://www.sitepoint.com.nyud.net:8090/forums/show post.php?p=2265475&postcount=40

Another Site Down Because of Bickering

[Katia22]

If you guys read the statement, you will understand that the site is not down because of technical difficulties, but of because of "A Lazy Owner" and bickering between the volunteers, If they don't want to bother bringing the site back down, the least they could do is to distribute the content, so that other people can host it themselves. After the all the website belongs to them, but the content doesnt.

Re:Another Site Down Because of Bickering

[MooUK]

The same person sitting there doing nothing and preventing them from restarting the site by hanging on to the backups... well, he's got the backups. Little difficult for anyone else to get the content from them. Interesting, really, that the response to your comment comes from exactly the same article that you were berating people from not reading.

Re:Another Site Down Because of Bickering

[Katia22]

Apologies for not being clear in my original post, I did understand the fact that the back ups are being held on to "Frank". What I was trying to get through though is the legal implications of this, why can he hold on to the content if it doesnt belong to him, sure the media that the backups are on belong to him, but not the content right?, So in short, my question is if these designs are covered by the GPL (not sure if they were) Does the license have any clause that can sort out cases like this?

Raises an interesting question

[linuxwrangler]

What open-source information and reference site(s) would you find it most difficult to live without? What if freshmeat just disappeared? Or osnews? Or Slashdot or SourceForge?

Just curious.

Re:Raises an interesting question

[trollable]

SF is the most important one for me, but it is not an information or reference site. So here is my list: freshmeat, slashdot, linuxfr, gnu.org, java.net, osnews, jesuislibre.
Now let's not forget music: Jamendo.

just keep on the 'open-source' topic, posters!

[fantomas]

It's lucky you made you clear you were interested in which open-source information and reference site(s) slashdotters couldn't live without. I'm really not sure I'd like to know about some of the other sites people here visit on a regular basis ....

Re:Maybe I'm not reading this correctly, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds to me like Frank is being a money grubbing noob, and only wanted to reap the benefits of having the server online. i think its about time he gave it up. obviously his coding skills SUCK, otherwise the site would already be back online.

Markets Adapt

[Sweep The Leg]

I think the article is making a pretty bold claim. Most of these situations tend to resolve themselves eventually and something as trivial as a website doesn't cause death. This reminds me of the days when a major local warez bbs got busted and the scene was declared "dead." Yeah right.

What especially strikes me is about the part "webmasters who rely on open source design." If you're a real designer, you shouldn't have to rely on anything like this except your own talent. Things like this site are certainly a great help and can speed things along, but I do not see how anyone can attach "designer" to their name and then feel the world is over when a website they use is down. Furthermore, there are other websites out there that may be smaller, but do a good job catering to this audience.

Forgive my ignorance, but design sites were around before this site and will be after. Apparently their design didn't accomodate actually hosting content reliably -- perhaps that should be included in their next template.

Re:Markets Adapt

[hammeredpeon]

I'm not a web designer. I don't claim to be. But I like to write web applications that don't look like shit, and using the designs provided on oswd let me do that.

Webmaster != web designer != web developer

No idea how this got modded insightful.

Then fork

[suso]

If a project is useful, and the people in control of the project won't help the project evolve in some direction or just sit on it and do nothing, you fork the code. In this case, you might not have access to the website source code, but I would think there would be an archive somewhere.

This is the reason why there should be at least two independent people in charge of open source projects.

Re:Then fork

[jmony]

This is exactly what I believe should be done: fork. It's open source we are talking about. The domain name doesn't matter; the content does.

Re:Then fork

[Jesus_666]

I remember such a "fork". I'm a member of a pretty large German community. We have a network of websites (mostly gaming related) and a huge forum connecting them. About one year ago the founder and owner of most of the sites decided that Final Fantasy XI was more important that the community. We didn't see him for about six months, then he came back and got into a huge argument with the other administrators. The result: Some of the sites had to change their names, domains and designs as he has decided that we can't use them anymore.
This has hit the community pretty hard as the sites responsible for most of the user influx had to relocate (and the forum itself as well), resulting in a decreasing number of new menbers.

Never underestimate the power of a brand. If lots of people know OSWD.org that doesn't mean lots of people know OSWD.net. Also, once you change the domain you have lots of dangling links, especially if you managed to get your name in the press in the past.

Sometimes forking is the only way out, but it does hurt the community.

We Can Rebuild It

[Bugmaster]

Surely, someone has the relevant OSWD content cached somewhere ? If the site truly does die (as seems likely), how hard would it be to simply rebuild it from cached content, using Slashcode or Scoop or whatever lightweight CMS it was originally using ?

I find it kind of ridiculous that one man appears to have the power to eliminate a valuable resource used by thousands of users. That just can't be right.

Re:We Can Rebuild It

[MooUK]

Not right, no. But believe it; that's what happens surprisingly often.

Re:We Can Rebuild It

[LifelessJosh]

Hello, I'm JoshPowell from OSWD. (Staff, or more specifically a design approver and I'm also judging the latest contest) This is not meant to be a flamebait, so please don't take it as one, but you obviously don't know anything about OSWD. OSWD was not using any CMS, it was 100% coded from scratch, the whole site. Including the forums. So we can't just recreate that overnight.. it was a long-time work in progress. All the data? There where thousands of designs, with anywhere from 3-5 more being posted daily. You can't find that in a google cache or on archive.org ;) You may be able to find some of the more popular designs from users, but it will be impossible to get all, or even most of the designs back from cached copies or whatever. OSWD was really a huge, and community driven site. It will be hard to re-build, if it is not ressurected as-is, or as it was. Josh

Re:We Can Rebuild It

[Bugmaster]

Ok, I had no idea that you guys hardcoded everything by hand (I wasn't a frequent OSWD user, so I know next to nothing about it). But I still think that, given the apparently overwhelming number of users that you had, at least some of the data would be recoverable. I personally, for example, sometimes wget portions of my favorite sites, just so that I have access to them locally. Sadly, OSWD was not one of my favorite sites; however, I can't possibly be the only wget-happy user out there... can I ?

Yeah.. wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

worried that the absence of OSWD.org will hit the internet hard and maybe even kill the scene.

I will have to stop writing open source when some crappy servlet site dies? ... Wow.. I must be surfing slashdot again...

What's OSWD?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does that stand for? I've been a Linux developer for just over 10 years and I've never heard of this site.

Re:What's OSWD?

[hatrisc]

_O_pen _S_ource _W_eb _D_esign

Re:What's OSWD?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's some misunderstanding about their name which is actually Obviously Shitty Web Design.

I hope they stay dead and that the thousands of other shitty sites trying to be about "Web Design" die as well. There isn't much more than a handful of web design sites that are worth even looking at and the rest just clogs up any net search on design with shitty advice, misleading and incomplete information, and brainless "solutions".

And associating OSWD with the open source movement is just ludicrous and an insult to F/OSS. What OSWD did is like collecting poo and selling it as Open Source Poo (some people will buy anything).

Re:What's OSWD?

[hatrisc]

I have to agree with you. Most of the web is a pile of monkey poo. There are very few sites that actually live up to the term "good design." Some are well designed from an information standpoint, but not well designed in the visual sense.

I know frank.

[hatrisc]

I work with him, and he is currently re-coding the site and it should be up soon.

I do not know anything about the 'political' drama that Aaron claims, nor do I know if it will be resolved.

Re:I know frank.

[CaptainPinko]

if you know frank why don't you ask him to post a statement to inform the community or at least make some of templates available on an ftp server for the meantime.

Why was this modded funny?

Re:I know frank.

[hatrisc]

I will make him aware of the post. I'm not sure why I was modded funny. I'm serious. If anything +5 serious.

Re:I know frank.

[LifelessJosh]

(I'm JoshPowell, OSWD staff)

But WHY take it all offline? From what Aaron has told me/posted on Sitepoint, the site is fine, all the data is still there, etc. If you want to recode it, fine. But why not at least keep it online in the meanwhile, so you don't cause a riot ;)

I know that I'm biased, but OSWD was one of, if not my favorite site. And I really really miss the inspiration that comes from that site.

I'm not sure about the whole politcal thing, but I can attest to Monkeyman pretty much doing everything of importance. Sure, I helped out with a lot of the design approval the last couple weeks, but other than that MoneyMan did it all, for the most part.

Please hurry up Frank, I miss the site! ;)

Josh

Re:I know frank.

[Anonymous Coward]

s/inspiration/free cash/gi
s/site/cash cow/gi

Re:I know frank.

[hatrisc]

As I understand it, Frank didn't put up the site again right away because he needed motivation to redesign it. He was unhappy with the current codebase and design and used the server problems as a "fire under his ass" to get the new site done. He has posted a statement on oswd.org explaining the new difficulties which Aaron has caused.

OSWD.org

[jlebrech]

OSWD Who?

Real Shame...

[CaptainPinko]

Looking at the site in the http://www.oswd.org/">WaybackMachine it looks like I could have really used that site in the past. Apparently it was a collection of website designs with the HTML/CSS/JS posted. I love doing web-development (especially the back-end XML processing etc) but I'm not the most creative person out there so having a an entire collection of designs I could flip through all in one play wwould be handy for me to slap-together a oook of my own when I need to. I'm book marking that site just incase it comes back. Heres to hoping.

#include

[Anonymous Coward]

#include <obligatory-seth-finkelstein-rant-about-michael-si ms-and-censorware-dot-org.h>

OSS makes no sense for this.

[kuzb]

F/OSS principles say that the advantage of having an open product is that you can fix problems in it if you need to. You're free to do this because the source code is available for you to work on. HTML is a lousy example of something that should *need* to be opensourced. It's *distributed* in source form. Ergo, anyone using it can modify and edit the html as they see fit. I don't see what the point of making a few people do a lot of work so the lazy can profit is. That's all this encourages, is a bunch of people who get to sell YOUR work for nothing. The only time this might make sense is with images, where the final product, and the raw photoshop image are different. I think a site like this is a mistake, and will only aim to create a bunch more clueless webmasters who don't need to understand anything, because the good people at oswd.com are doing it all for you. Thanks guys.

The biggest complaint I hear from freelance designers (who are very good at what they do, unlike the clueless masses of people who think they are web design gods) is that they lose contracts on a regular basis to people who either a) rip sites, or b) use sites like this for their designs. These people have no talent, no skill and no ability. They haven't worked at perfecting any kind of art. They simply take free things and copy/paste them together, and then sell them as their own to people who would otherwise be clients of people who do it for real, and produce a superior product.

I know what you're thinking, that it's a free market, and that people should have the right to choose, but often times what happens is the client only sees the bid value. Of course, the people who use sites like oswd will charge a lot less mostly because after they throw up their stock site, with their stock images, and their stock PHP code, it has taken them less than a few hours of work. On the other hand, it takes a professional a week or more to do something original and worth having.

So, excuse me if I don't shed a tear for oswd. Truth be told, I'd rather see them shut down. They help facilitate the mutilation of an industry that many independants rely on. I'm not talking about large corporations either, but people like you and me, living paycheque to paycheque on their talents and abilities.

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[Chrononium]

Same argument given for lots of protectionist schemes, especially against outsourcing. If a client decides to go with a cheaper bid, then it's because the client wants to pay less for the same perceived value. If you're a really good designer, then you should be able to create a package with greater perceived value. If you can't, then you're falling behind the times. You will lose the contract. After all, website designers are still people who write software and sell it. A big software company like Microsoft faces the same problem. More value = more clients. Open source will always take care of the baseline and every now and then, it will raise the bar.

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[psyborg]

You're missing the point about an important aspect of oswd: Education. Think of the templates as an extension of basic HTML tutorials. A lot of people use oswd to get practical experience with HTML and CSS, "I wonder how he achieved this effect? Let's have a look"... This is also evident in the associated forums where the designers hang out to help beginners.

You may object that you can do this with every website already. Granted, but it's hell of a lot more difficult. some sites have really obfuscated code, sometimes deliberately so, sometimes because a CMS engine doesn't care. At oswd, everything is conveniently bundled (ok, ideally) in one or two neatly formatted and commented files.

Finally, think of situations like this: You're the poor webmaster for your workgroup or department. You're really a scientist/student, but you've familarized yourself with HTML enough to be picked by the PHB to do it. Now you can either put out a crappy site, or you can at least use a decent oswd design and customize it to your needs. Never will you have the option to hire an expensive freelance webdesigner!

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[Bogtha]

F/OSS principles say that the advantage of having an open product is that you can fix problems in it if you need to.

No, it says that's one of the advantages. Another is having a group of people working on the same thing is more productive than having them work on identical, private projects. An open-source web design project has the advantage that people can improve a design (e.g. work around obscure browser bugs, speed things up with AJAX, etc), and everybody using that design benefits.

This doesn't apply to oswd.org though, or at least it didn't last time I checked. It was basically a place where (and I don't mean any disrespect here) a bunch of amateurs cooked up a bunch of mock-ups that they thought looked half decent, and posted them for anybody to use. There was essentially no collaboration on projects, which is why it doesn't get any of the real advantages of open-source.

There was a real quality problem too. For the majority of its existence, it didn't even allow images to be used, which had the effect (in my opinion) of encouraging only beginner designers to submit their own templates. There was no quality barrier to my knowledge, as long as it worked in Internet Explorer and Netscape, it was let in. Consequently, you had to wade through 99 awful designs, that looked like a five year-old had used every crayon in the box, to find a single decent-looking design. Since then, I believe they've started allowing images, so perhaps the quality is rising. Still no Javascript though.

The site was essentially dead for months previously too, as no designs were being approved. Obviously with only one person approving the designs, it was a single point of failure. This hasn't been solved.

What needs to change for a real open-source web design website to work properly, is a few things:

• Allow images, Javascript, server-side code,
• Allow community voting to approve designs, Kuro5hin-style,
• Allow collaboration on designs - e.g. the ability to comment on designs, post patches, etc.
• An Atom/RSS feed to let people know when a design has been updated,
• Version control and public access to check out the latest version.

These changes remove the bottlenecks, encourage collaboration, and allow people to use the designs in the most efficient way.

The biggest complaint I hear from freelance designers (who are very good at what they do, unlike the clueless masses of people who think they are web design gods) is that they lose contracts on a regular basis to people who either a) rip sites, or b) use sites like this for their designs. These people have no talent, no skill and no ability. They haven't worked at perfecting any kind of art. They simply take free things and copy/paste them together, and then sell them as their own to people who would otherwise be clients of people who do it for real, and produce a superior product.

Essentially, those freelance designers are whining that the value they add isn't important to many people. Like it or not, many small businesses can't justify the expense of bespoke design work, and so they won't pay for it. If your freelance designer friends don't like that, then maybe they should offer a service that caters to these businesses instead of pretending that they are somehow wronged by other people offering a more appropriate service to their potential customers.

Of course, that doesn't apply to people copying non-open designs, just the people using sites like this instead of designing something original.

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[Cyphertube]

OSS makes a lot of sense when you think about reuse of underlying code. If you only think about the pure visual design, yeah, ripping off a template is a really dumb idea.

When it comes to working out the underlying functionality, or finding the latest workaround for some IE broken aspect, or basically ANYTHING code-wise there are only a few legitimate ways to go about it.

1. Work on it for hours and come upon it by yourself.
2. Read a published article on it and follow the advice.
3. Grab a template for which you have permission to use it, and go wild on figuring out how to modify that for yourself.

Do I think the GPL is the way to go for templates? Probably not. Creative Commons Licensing is probably a MUCH better way to go.

If people still think they should be able to make money by simply putting together something pretty for their client, then they're not really helping. A lot of what goes into good web design is a combination of marketing skills and information architecture. If you aren't providing those skills to your client, then they are honestly just as well off using pre-fab templates in the end.

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[kuzb]

*sigh*. It's hard to change an opinion on slashdot, many have their own opinions and views as to how things should be, and nobody, but *nobody* can change that. Except in a few rare instances where someone produces a really good argument, as you've done now.

I hate the freeloading bastards who make it hard for my friends to find work (I should mention, I'm not a designer, I'm a backend developer, but many people I know are *that good* at design. As a result of it getting too hard to freelance, I now work for a corporation, as do some of these people), but on the other hand, I'm a big supporter of education, and teaching people. I actively participate as a moderator in ##php on freenode. Before that, I was active (as a moderator) in many channels on EFNet helping people with HTML and Javascript related issues. I know, I just said I wasn't a designer. However, there is a big difference between understanding the mechanics of something, and being able to add an overall artistic vision to it. I have a great deal of respect for designers who can grasp both the mechanics, and the vision at the same time.

Perhaps you're right. Maybe I do have it all wrong. Perhaps what we need here is a provision that says you can't use a template (or site theme pack, or whatever you'd like to call it) for a commercial endevour. My goal with my initial post was not to take a learning resource away from people with a genuine interest in trying to figure it all out, but to make people aware that sites like oswd get *abused*. The end result of that abuse is less work for people who really need it. Good HTML/CSS design is not something that it's easy to find a professional course for. Many take to trial and error, and finding people who have 'been around the block', so to speak. Sifting the good information from the bad takes a significant amount of time, effort and energy. Especially considering how browsers have a tendancy to differ. On the other hand, what good is teaching these people how to do it right when they'll face the same problems professional designers do now? If I were to hazard an educated guess, I'd say for every 1 person who really wanted to learn something, there are at least 5 more who will take it for straight profit. Ignoring in the process all the intrinsic value the package has to teach them to do it themselves.

I'll always have a special place in my heart for those who struggle to learn something they didn't know yesterday, and a growing hate for those who try to live off the sweat of others who paid their dues.

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest complaint I hear from Professional Artists (who are very good at what they do, unlike the clueless masses of people who think they are music gods) is that they lose money on a regular basis to people who either a) rip their song styles, or b) use music or CC music to make other music. These people have no talent, no skill and no ability. They haven't worked at perfecting any kind of art. They simply take free things and copy/paste them together, and then sell them as their own to people who would otherwise be clients of people who do it for real, and produce a superior product.

and we all release a collective WAHHHHH! for the big babies that think they are superior because they went to some stupid art school.

Boo Fricking Hoo you wannabe whiner.

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[kuzb]

Hey, if you want to work at a 7-11 or McDonalds for the rest of your life, by all means, do it. You won't see me trying to stop you. While many of the designers I know didn't attend any art school (thus making your point somewhat questionable), they have spent many years in self-improvement. You'll know you're starting to do it right when finding people to look at what you're doing gets easier because they're asking you what you're doing out of interest.

As for the whole superiority complex, I don't recall saying that these *people* are superior to *other* people. I *do* recall saying they produce a superior product. They would even be quite happy to help you with some of the harder points in design provided you were making an effort to better yourself. The point here is they've honed a skill - it's a *fact* that anyone who works at something gets better at it. Don't be bitter that some people are better at things than you are because you've failed to invest yourself in to it. If you want it, *invest yourself in it*. Don't sit on the sidelines wishing you could.

I have a lot of other friends who are musicians. The vast majority of people who approach them seem to think they have some secret which, if shared, will make them master musicians too. The *fact* of the matter is, these people *worked* to get where they are with their talent. They sacrificed time for their art. They paid their dues. They've *earned* their talent.

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[baadger]

OSWD has stumbled because most of the work was falling on one person, who didn't have access to all of the resources need to keep the site going. There was no open source effort.

The reason months went by with no designs being approved was because this guy was away. But just before the site went down it was buzzing with new designs daily, most of which were of a reasonably high standard, XHTML, CSS etc.Follow the link in the main article via the blog and you will see some pretty 'professional' designs.

I believe designs had to validate and look 'right' in ALL of the big browsers too (Thank Firefox's popularity for that).

Copyrighting a layout or a visual style is somewhat difficult, there is a certain level of inspiration that can be obtained under the scope copyright laws. I believe one of the complaints from OSWD contributors was people 'ripping off' their designs without any acknowledgement, most ask for atleast some acknowledgement of their work or of OSWD.

You make some good bullet points about improving the system, let's hope it'll be reborn with some of them.

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[kuzb]

Essentially, those freelance designers are whining that the value they add isn't important to many people.

No, essentially those freelance designers are complaining because sites like this contribute to their work shortage. Some of them do cut their rates because they recognize that not everyone has $5000 for a new site. However, it forces some of them to have to give up design, and take other jobs. After 5+ years of learning how to do it right, it's hard to let it go without a fight. Imagine how angry you'd be if you were forced to give up something you love, something you worked at, because rank amateurs flooded the market with crap.

On the other hand, following your logic, outsourcing software development to India must be OK too. I mean, there's no value-add to the corporations for developing software in-country. So, I suppose all the people who were rendered jobless by the corporate machines are whiney people as well?

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[Bogtha]

But just before the site went down it was buzzing with new designs daily, most of which were of a reasonably high standard, XHTML, CSS etc.

I appreciate that a lot of people have put a lot of work into the designs that they've submitted to that site, so I'm trying not to be too harsh. But you and I must have very different ideas of what is a "reasonably high standard". The typical designs I saw on that site were garish beginner stuff in my opinion. There were a few decent ones here and there, but they were a very small minority.

Perhaps this has changed; I stopped visiting the site regularly when months went by without any updates, but I visited once recently, and saw that they were now allowing images, which might have made things a little better.

Follow the link in the main article via the blog and you will see some pretty 'professional' designs.

Bear in mind, that's a selection of the best of the best, and is not representative of typical designs you'd find on that site. You'd have to wade through a lot worse to find designs of that quality, and even so, the designs really aren't anything noteworthy (I'd only call about 10% of those "best of the best" designs "professional").

I believe designs had to validate and look 'right' in ALL of the big browsers too (Thank Firefox's popularity for that).

I believe validation is a recent change. Validation would be the bare minimum I would expect from a site such as this, there's a lot more to good code than validation.

I believe one of the complaints from OSWD contributors was people 'ripping off' their designs without any acknowledgement, most ask for atleast some acknowledgement of their work or of OSWD.

I actually brought the problem up with them a long, long time ago. Some people think "open-source" means that they are free to do what they like with the code, other people think that there's a requirement to acknowledge with a link, etc. I suggested clarification, but the response I got was basically "meh, hasn't been a problem so far, who cares?". That's a sloppy attitude.

You make some good bullet points about improving the system, let's hope it'll be reborn with some of them.

The impression I get is that there is a pretty average PHP coder trying to keep everything running, but lacks the time or commitment to run it properly. I don't blame him for that, lack of time and commitment is what stopped me from creating something better, but it's not something that's conducive to a thriving community, and I don't expect major changes to happen.

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[Bogtha]

No, essentially those freelance designers are complaining because sites like this contribute to their work shortage.

I am a freelance designer. And I fully recognise that I have no right to expect work. I have to provide a service people want. If people want a website, they want a website. The crap template vendors provide that. If they value a quality, bespoke design at the extra cost to hire me, then I am providing a service they want. If they don't value a quality, bespoke design at the extra cost to hire me, then I am not providing a service they want, and have no right to complain that they aren't hiring me.

Imagine how angry you'd be if you were forced to give up something you love, something you worked at, because rank amateurs flooded the market with crap.

There's a large market for crap and a small market for quality work. That's true of pretty much every endeavour. If you can't make a living doing the quality work, then the market is too small to support you, and you lack the skill to compete with the other quality workers effectively.

There isn't any meaningful competition between the crap workers and the quality workers. If all the crap workers magically disappeared, organisations wouldn't have thousands more to spend on their websites, most of them would just go without.

The real problem in the web design market are the people who write crap code and use templates, but charge the same as the quality workers. Since organisations usually lack the knowledge to judge web design by anything but the most superficial measures, they essentially get conned.

On the other hand, following your logic, outsourcing software development to India must be OK too.

There's arguments for and against, but I'm not against outsourcing in principle, no. It's the natural result of a free market and different costs of living. In the long term, the costs of living will equalise and the value of outsourcing will disappear.

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting *point* could you *please* *tell* me *more*!

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[kuzb]

Sure. As soon as you stop trolling, and log in with a real slashdot account so I know who to add to my 'enemies' list.

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[baadger]

I appreciate that a lot of people have put a lot of work into the designs that they've submitted to that site, so I'm trying not to be too harsh. But you and I must have very different ideas of what is a "reasonably high standard". The typical designs I saw on that site were garish beginner stuff in my opinion.

• A lot of the stuff is quite old, dating back to late 2000 and there appears to be at least some correlation between age and quality, which is good. In terms of appreciable quality I'd say the standard of the contributions has been improving rapidly recently. Nearly all of the 'best of the best' designs you refer to are amongst the most recent.
• There was talk a while back on the OSWD forums about throwing out old and low quality designs. I think the typical response was people have different opinions of what is good and bad and it would be a bit disrespectful to the early contributors to remove their work. This may happen as a consequence of the reformation of the site now anyway, as these designs are less likely to have been saved.
• The designs were/are categorised to those that conformed to XHTML, CSS and those that conform to HTML4 (or earlier?).
• Remember all the designs, in terms of $$$ if nothing else, are free. Hopefully you wouldn't expect to find top notch professional work. If the contributors had this level of skill, they'd surely be selling their efforts already (Admittedly, yes, alot of web design jobs rely on verbal reputation and having a good portfolio, but these free designs can theoretically be good publicity in themselves).
• Most importantly, one of the great things about the community was anybody could contribute a design. A few the designs you or I might consider aweful may have a small feature or quality someone else finds inspiring. A few aren't even practical for the majority of sites, but are unconventional and interesting. Setting the entry bar too high could be damaging to the community. It's important the site doesn't just start pushing good designers as producers and Joe I. Blog as a consumer. Letting some pretty garish designs through the door can be necessary to the learning curve. The OSWD forums have had quite a few 'What do you guys think of my first submission?' like posts. Having several entry points, good categorisation, management and a rating system has the potential to create a welcoming compromise. OSWD needed/needs work in these areas, it's not an easy task, and a much greater one than a single PHP developer can provide come moderator can provide.

Lets see what happens, at the least you have pushed some ideas out there. oswd.org has an announcement at the moment from Frank, the whole thing seems petty and misguided.

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[baadger]

It's now of course that I read you're a freelance designer. :} so hopefully I have made no crazy assumptions about your profession.

It strikes me that maybe we are viewing OSWD from different perspectives (me as a consumer and you as a critic (in a nice way) and probably potentially very skilled/experienced contributor).

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[Bogtha]

In terms of appreciable quality I'd say the standard of the contributions has been improving rapidly recently.

That's great. I'll be sure to check it out again once it's back up.

I think the typical response was people have different opinions of what is good and bad and it would be a bit disrespectful to the early contributors to remove their work.

I'm in two minds about that. On the one hand, designs take up such a small amount of space that there's essentially no limit on how many designs such a site can hold. On the other, without a lower threshold for quality, it can be hard to find decent designs.

I agree that what constitutes a good design is subjective (designers typically like dark colour schemes and small font sizes much more than everybody else), but I still think that most people can agree that at least some designs aren't good enough.

Remember all the designs, in terms of $$$ if nothing else, are free. Hopefully you wouldn't expect to find top notch professional work.

I don't think that them being free matters to the quality of the work. Apache is free. PostgreSQL is free. I don't expect them to be crap just because they are free.

Setting the entry bar too high could be damaging to the community.

The way Kuro5hin used to work was that even beginning writers could submit articles, and, while it was in the edit queue, people could offer suggestions on how to improve it, corrections, or reasons why they were voting it down.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that bad designs are rejected outright, I'm suggesting that they go through a similar process, so that even if a design gets rejected, the submitter gets valuable feedback and the opportunity to resubmit an improved design.

Also on Kuro5hin, users could add articles to their own diary and have them show up on the site, albeit not in the main section. There's no reason that wouldn't work for OSWD too, allowing people to share their efforts (no matter how bad), without detracting from the main site.

oswd.org has an announcement at the moment from Frank, the whole thing seems petty and misguided.

Agreed.

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[baadger]

designers typically like dark colour schemes and small font sizes much more than everybody else

I quite like white and greys myself. With splashings of colour. But then again, I suck ;D

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the stock PHP code the designers use?
Where does it come from? Maybe the people in the Open source community, who use webtemplates and distribute web software.
You can't say you hate everyone who volunteers work to something without isolating yourself from the rest of the world. Effectively, your saying "I hate everyone who gives people food because they don't learn to farm", this sharing and specialization is a core aspect of modern economics and is one FOSS's greatest strengths in advancing market share. It's a capitalism of ideas and OSWD will survive, and get bigger and more specialized. Creatures like Frank will adapt or be eliminated, even Gates is releasing source licenses. So, is there a new site posted here somewhere for the OSWD community to discuss a new repository? SourceForge?

Re:OSS makes no sense for this.

[sage2k6]

Have to agree with you... I have no sympathy for ppl who have no entreprenueral spirit.

Having done a lot of web design myself, half the time when you're stuck, it's a choice between: flipping through 3 manuals/handbook all describing your problem with no real solutions, searching online for hours for someone who knows anything about it, and going to a place like OSWD where there is already a solution that you can use. And it's not like those grab-N-go code is really that easy to use either... they very often conflict with existing code (which means you may need to mod either your existing template to fit the code, or the grab-N-go code to fit your template).

Most web designer recycle their code/stylesheet/scripts anyways - it's there already! why bother changing it if it doesn't need change?

In today's market, especially NA, there are too many things being out-sourced. If you can't think of new, unique ways of improving the process, or be someone who cannot be replaced in your field, then you WILL be replaced sooner or later, by out-sourcing or by automation. It's the natural evolution of technology - if there is a way to do it cheaper and/or better, it'll happen.

The biggest what?

[/dev/trash]

Never heard of it.

Re:The biggest what?

[trash eighty]

nor me, must be a trash thing heh

"hit the internet hard"

[Anonymous Coward]

...others are worried that the absence of OSWD.org will hit the internet hard and maybe even kill the scene.

Experts say that apart from the hundreds of ugly website templates OSWD.org was known for, it also maintained secret codes vital to the functioning of the TCP/IP protocol stack, which are now inaccessible. It is believed that their absence could bring the internet as we know it to a grinding halt. Engineers at the IETF and W3C are reportedly hard at work developing an alternative protocol stack that could replace TCP/IP, should such an catastrophe occur.

Meanwhile, U.S. President George W. Bush has stated that he is willing to use military force to liberate TCP/IP from the oppression of OSWD.org, in keeping with America's historic role as protector of the internet.

Hosting

[queenb**ch]

I'm certain that many of us who have benefited from you would be willing to drop you some cash via PayPal. I use a very responsive hosting company and have had no complaints so far. If you like, I'd be happy to help you get back up and running with a new URL. Just sign in and leave a private message on blog (URL above) and we'll get cracking.

2 cents,

Queen B

Eh, plenty of other similar sites

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.freewebtemplates.com/
http://www.4layouts.com/
http://www.freelayouts.com/

etc. etc.

Pretty mixed bag in terms of quality but they all have quite a few, and they're all "Open Source".

Re:Eh, plenty of other similar sites

[LifelessJosh]

Yes, there are other free template sites out there (although lots of the aforementioned aren't open source. You need to credit the author, and can't do whatever you like with the code.)

But there are several things that make OSWD different:

1. Standards compliance! You won't find a design on OSWD (at least, that has been submitted in the last year.) that doesn't validate valid XHTML or HTML, and the majority are also CSS valid.

2. Community driven. EVERYTHING on OSWD is user driven. Everybody pitches in and shares their work, helps other web authors fix bugs in their code, and mentor new webmasters.

3. Selection. OSWD has/had thousands of templates you can use.. with more added every day. They are really unmatched in the free template world.

Yes, I'll be the first to admit that not all of them are quality designs. But the atomsphere, and a large number of the designs, are of the finest quality there is ;)

Josh

Domains are cheap

[Ofenza]

I'd say, buy a new domain and start fresh, Aaron. Do your thing.

Never heard of them

[tyrione]

The FOSS movement will manage to survive, without them.

Re: mod parent up

[Gusano]

reason this was modded funny beats me...but c'mon moderators!!

mod parent up as informative!

Do you have a few zips on your hard disk? I do!

[Marcion]

I am/was/will be a user of OSWD (the open source bit rather than the tacky commerical section). I have quite a few of the zips on my hard disk, others users may do too if they search enough. How about someone puts a new site up - GNUwebdesign or whatever and we can send them all in.

Contact the user known as 'Haran' too, he wrote all the best XHTML ones.

Solution

[porkface]

When Frank pays somebody to get the site back up for him, someone should just rip the designs and spawn a competitor the community can trust and participate in.

correction

[Anonymous Coward]

in risk ?

Don't you mean "at risk ?" ?

Licensing

[suwain_2]

Right before the site went down, there was a lot of talk about licensing. People would sometimes complain that one design was based on another design; there were occasional incidents of people submitting copyrighted work. A discussion popped up not too long ago about the need for a clear license that submissions would be under.

I found OSWD to be incredibly useful, but I hope that, when it comes back, it'll have an explicit license agreement.

design

[chizor]

real designers can work without canned templates. nuff said

Re:design

[Anonymous Coward]

My sentiments exactly. If you can't design a site and code it from scratch in a text editor, you aren't a 'web designer', IMO.

I am not an anonymous coward. Just don't want to register when I might never post here again. Came here from some comments posted at SitePoint.

Re:design

[natefanaro]

Yeah but sometimes programmers don't want their long hours of coding to look like ass when it's done.

slashdots motives??

[Anonymous Coward]

one shouldnt wonder why slashdot is trolling... I am surprised that noone has pointed out that these problems occur more frequently with O_pen S_ource than F_ree S_oftware:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-fr eedom.html

May not be about greed either

[john82]

Don't count on this story being about greed either. We've only heard one side of the story. Having nothing to compare that to there is no way to know the accuracy of that version.

Though it wasn't the other party in question ("Frank"), someone did speak up for him. Look for the poster hatrisc in earlier replies. He claims that Frank is recoding the site.

Again, who knows what the truth is but it doesn't make any sense to be adamant about your position (over someone elses) when there are insufficient facts at hand.

Re:May not be about greed either

[Anonymous Coward]

And going by the type of sponsored content they had on the site, what could this Frank guy have been making? $50 a month? The idea that this is about greed doesn't hold up. Sounds like a spat between kids.

Why is this shit on slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh right, slow news day, prob with slashdot is that it's turned into pure sensationalism, proof that not even online news sources (this is more like a news portal) are safe.

Now then, this started happening a while back, and from the article, it basically states that they're okay now, they have new hosting and the only thing that will kill it now is if the founder gets bored.

Yep, totally news worthy.

correction: aaron has database

[pikine]

Apparently, according to this announcement on oswd.org,

I was looking to relaunch tomorrow, however, upon inspection of the data on the old server, I believe Aaron "MonkeyMan" Nikula has deleted the contents of the database. After reading some of what Aaron has posted on the SitePoint Forums, I am under the impression he has made a copy of the database before deletion.

Aaron (the one who did a large amount of work) is the one holding the site ransom until Frank (the original creator of OSWD) agrees to transfer ownership of the site to him. Aaron does have the database that constitute the designs on OSWD, and nothing prevents him from forking the site. All he wants now is the ownership.

Re:correction: aaron has database

[Monkeyman334]

I'm not holding anything ransom, the site is forked: Open Web Design.

Re:correction: aaron has database

[pikine]

I hope you don't mean that Frank now has all the freedom he wants to import the designs one by one, by hand.

parent is misinformation

[pikine]

Frank (OSWD owner) may have been a lazy bum, but Aaron (one who did a lot of work on OSWD) does have a copy of the content of OSWD database and nothing prevents him from forking a new site. I think Aaron's previous post is deliberately misleading, as he blames Frank to be the source of problem.

It seems more likely that Aaron is holding the site in ransom until Frank agrees to transfer OSWD ownership to him.

Re:parent is misinformation

[Bogtha]

Okay, we have Aaron claiming one thing, and Frank claiming another. The only evidence either way so far are the people (including myself) who have visited the site in the past and seen Aaron (a.k.a. MonkeyMan) very involved in the site, but not Frank, in accordance with Aaron's claims.

On what basis are you claiming that one side is telling the truth and the other side is "misinformation", "deliberately misleading", etc? Do you have some insider knowledge that the rest of us don't?

Re:parent is misinformation

[pikine]

I don't have insider information, and I made the claim entirely on the basis of the two public posts by Aaron without even looking at what Frank says about the issue.

Aaron wrote:

Also, I don't have access to OSWD or access to my email account. ... The problem is that Frank won't do the work to bring it back up. There are no technical problems anymore, he's just sitting on it.

Any person reading this gets the impression that Aaron is not allowed to build OSWD (not having access), nor even fork it (Frank is "sitting on it"), and that he can't do anything unless Frank does something ("Frank won't do the work to bring it back up"). Let's call this "The Great Confusion."

Now look at what Aaron wrote again:

I have a copy of the site, I think I might just put it up on another domain name. Give me a few days to arrange hosting.

Aaron contradicts his own words with "The Great Confusion." Now he's admitting that he could have forked OSWD if he wanted to. My intetion for the original "parent misinformation" post was to correct the misconception if you only read Aaron's first post.

I'm not saying Aaron doesn't deserve credit for his work, but he's expecting Frank to grant him the ownership. I don't care what you think whether Aaron deserves ownership through his hard work, but what he's doing, spreading misleading accusations to fuel his propaganda to force Frank into giving up OSWD, is downright outrageous.

Re:parent is misinformation

[Bogtha]

Sorry, no. You are reading way, way too much into what he is saying. He's said that Frank is preventing him from bringing OSWD back up. He didn't say that Frank is preventing him from forking. He didn't say that he doesn't have a copy. If you think that he did, then take a reading comprehension class.

There is a huge difference between fixing an existing website and starting a new one. The explanatory post was clearly talking about fixing the existing OSWD website. When he said that there's nothing he can do about it, he's talking about fixing OSWD. Forking is not fixing.

This is a case of you putting words in his mouth and then attacking him for saying something he didn't say. If that's all you've got to go on, then your claim that this is "propaganda" is ludicrous, and your complaint about "misleading accusations" is hypocritical in the extreme.

Now Frank is claiming that Aaron deleted the OSWD database. If that's true, then it's despicable of Aaron. If it's not true, then it's despicable of Frank to lie about it. I don't know either way for sure, I suspect that Frank is lying, but I'm not going to throw around accusations like you have because I don't know for sure and neither do you. Why not wait and see how this plays out before accusing people?

Re:parent is misinformation

[pikine]

Obviously you favor Aaron's position, so you read Aaron's message in his favor and dismiss my reading comprehension skills. You're also putting word in his mouth, and you say I am hypocritical in the extreme? Give me a break!

Keep your petty personal insults to yourself please. Do you think your condescending attitude will win my sympathy for Aaron? And thanks for admitting that you don't know any better than I.

To be honest, I don't support either Frank or Aaron. I only ran into OSWD for a few times in the past, and I couldn't care less about them bickering at each other. They either work out their problems or not. Life goes on.

You buy my argument or not, life goes on. Feel free to keep bitching.

Re:parent is misinformation

[Bogtha]

Obviously you favor Aaron's position, so you read Aaron's message in his favor and dismiss my reading comprehension skills. You're also putting word in his mouth

No, I'm not. The difference between your position and mine is that you are saying that he is making claims like being unable to fork which are simply not evident, and I am merely pointing out that he said no such thing. Those are not equal positions.

Keep your petty personal insults to yourself please.

Again, hypocritical, considering how this thread started out. I was serious when I suggested reading comprehension lessons. I get the feeling you might not be a native English speaker, if this is the case, I suggest you not get into an argument with a native English speaker about what a native English speaker is saying in an English message.

Do you think your condescending attitude will win my sympathy for Aaron?

No, but I thought it might get you to think before making baseless accusations. Perhaps next time you will.

Re:parent is misinformation

[pikine]

hypocritical ... reading comprehension lessons ... baseless accusations

Gee, the size of your vocabulary is truly impressive.

Oh damn, you're right. I'm so not a native English speaker because I've got perfect grammar!

mybe i shuld start speakin brokn english tom ake my self mor ecredible!

It was Moses, not the Rabbis!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Bible states that Moses wrote the law, not the Rabbis.

Deuteronomy 31:9 So Moses wrote this law and delivered it to the priests, the sons of Levi, who bore the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and to all the elders of Israel.

Aaron may be a dope

[Anonymous Coward]

Aaron may be a dope, but frank's statements mark him as someone not telling the truth.

I have no dog in this hunt, but Frank's whining about "I was all set to bring it up and that bad Arron erased the content". That's the excuse you use in 10th grade as to why your homework wasn't done.

Yikes

[brice]

Wow.. what is wrong with you people?

    Try:

    http://www.csszengarden.com/

Re:Yikes

[Anonymous Coward]

are you just playing stupid ?
Zen Garden's design are absolutely non free.

Gone since Artwiz left...

[msimm]

I've tooled around the site a few times and really, it never impressed me. Maybe I'm jaded, but sites like kde-look seem to hit the mark much closer.

why is this story...

[Anonymous Coward]

...deserving of the front page? is it a slow day on slashdot?

newsgroups / p2p

[7andrew]

Perhaps more opensource info should be posted on newsgroups and p2p networks as well as to websites? That might make it easier to recover data when the site collapses and the owner is hard to contact.

Look now..

[Majestix]

Interesting...look at the site now...

Did Frank bow to preasure, or was the thought of his "baby" moving beyond his control too much?

Check out...

[Anonymous Coward]

OSWD.org.

The founder has decided to redesign the website. He's also saying that the db was erased and he's currently trying to get a copy of it.

Text is as follows:

A notice.

OSWD is currently down. Over the past three weeks, I have developed a new version of the site, complete with a redesign and new backend.

I was looking to relaunch tomorrow, however, upon inspection of the data on the old server, I believe Aaron "MonkeyMan" Nikula has deleted the contents of the database. After reading some of what Aaron has posted on the SitePoint Forums, I am under the impression he has made a copy of the database before deletion.

I hope to have the database recovered shortly and the site relaunched as soon as possible. I apologize to the faithful community OSWD has fostered over the past half decade.

Frank Skettino
Founder, OSWD

i made a mirror of all the designs

[Goog500]

while oswd.org is down, you can browse the designs at my mirror: http://www.alteredbeast.org/oswd