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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"
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
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.
>|<*:=
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.
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.
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.
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suwain_2