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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."
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???
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
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.
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
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.
I like muppets.
...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...
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
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.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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.
In the drops - An Aussie's musings on all things cycling
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
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
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?
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
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.
// If there's already another response like this, I apologize. It took me a while to write this.
6 5475&postcount=40.
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.
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=22
http://www.sitepoint.com.nyud.net:8090/forums/show post.php?p=2265475&postcount=40
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:
Life Insurance in Canada
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.
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.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
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
-Myke
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 ....
A. They aren't.
B. They don't need hosting.
C. Why don't you try reading the article once or twice?
feh. stuff.
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.
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.
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.
>|<*:=
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.
Nothing costs nothing
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.
I write code.
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.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
...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.
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.
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
HDGary secures my bank
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!
-- PsyBorg
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
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
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".
I'd say, buy a new domain and start fresh, Aaron. Do your thing.
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:
These changes remove the bottlenecks, encourage collaboration, and allow people to use the designs in the most efficient way.
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
nor me, must be a trash thing heh
The FOSS movement will manage to survive, without them.
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.
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.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
reason this was modded funny beats me...but c'mon moderators!!
mod parent up as informative!
.oo00OO
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.
_O_pen _S_ource _W_eb _D_esign
I write code.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
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.
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
My little Linux and tech blog
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.
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.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
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.
real designers can work without canned templates. nuff said
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).
That's great. I'll be sure to check it out again once it's back up.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
designers typically like dark colour schemes and small font sizes much more than everybody else
;D
I quite like white and greys myself. With splashings of colour. But then again, I suck
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 write code.
He must be new here...
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Apparently, according to this announcement on oswd.org,
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.
I once had a signature.
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.
I once had a signature.
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.
-----
"If everything seems to be going well, you obviously don't know what the hell is going on." - Murphy's Law
Wow.. what is wrong with you people?
Try:
http://www.csszengarden.com/
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.
Quack, quack.
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.
Interesting...look at the site now...
Did Frank bow to preasure, or was the thought of his "baby" moving beyond his control too much?
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
while oswd.org is down, you can browse the designs at my mirror: http://www.alteredbeast.org/oswd