What's up with Themes.org?

As a service to the community which has so long supported and enjoyed themes.org, I want to announce that the site has, indeed, died. From the time that the site was compromised by malevolent users last year, the situation at themes.org has become increasingly bleak. Plagued by bad decisions and apathetic sponsors, the volunteers who truly run the site have found themselves unable to keep it afloat, and so it has come to stagnate in obscurity. The powers that be, whose interests are completely separate from those of the community that themes.org serves, have decided not to announce that the themes.org project has been officially discontinued -- to be integrated, supposedly, into other generic, open source venues.

I have no doubt that the void left by themes.org will be filled. I caution all of you to fill that void with people and entities whose interests are consistent with those of the community that you wish to serve. It is the interest that themes.org's contributors had in the people with whom they worked and with whom they dealt regularly that inspired them to make the site great. It is my sincere desire that this interest revitalize themes.org in the form of a number of smaller sites, focused more clearly on their respective audiences and left more accountable to those who enjoy them.

I wish you the best of luck in all that you endeavor.

Jason Douglas Collins
Project Manager, bb.themes.org

I brought this up with one of the t.o coders at one point, but I think it bears raising again in a broader forum. Is harvesting all the content from the classic and/or current site (with the intent to redistribute) an option, or are there copyrights (By VA, perhaps?) that need to be adressed?

Obviously if the folks paying the bills chose to pull the plug, and the contributions of all those excellent themes and other resources disappear forever, it would be a great loss.

I'd volunteer some PHP coding for this. Call it th3m3s.org and recode it? There are already some good theme sites popping up in the absense of themes.org, one for KDE and one for Gnome.

I am generally dismayed by comments like this: "The powers that be, whose interests are completely separate from those of the community that themes.org serves, have decided..."

I was in NY for linuxworld & met a bunch of the former OSDN core people and general volunteers & what they had to say was just as forboding. Even some of the current employees/volunteers had nothing positive to say. (The SF guys were still cool)

I have since begun, and this was a seed idea previously, discussions with many good, high-quality, yet lesser known sites that live in OSDN's shadow to form a strong organization by consent instead of by ownership.... from the 'working doc':

*Create greater visibility for the entire organization outside of member sites. (Get out from under the shadow)
*Create greater visibilty for member sites within the organization.
*Work together to share our individual gifts, talents, and resources. (work together without owning J00!)
*It is recognized that each member's primary responsibility is to their contributing resource (website, company, or service). No member is expected or required to adversely affect their resource in advancing the network. (Do your own thing without interferance)
*The network will recognize all members as equal. Regardless of size, resources, status or seniority.
*We will work by a social structure of respect. The members with the greatest respect will act as benevolent dictators. But, one member equals one vote on all 'official' matters.
*We will work openly on all matters and keep a public record.
*We are an association by consent.
*We will be an inclusive organization. That is to say that we will happily agree to disagree for the purpose of working together on our common goals.

This sounds a little high minded, but it should playout practically. Sites work together instead of alone. They share resources/talents, whatever they can offer. And, do not give up control of their vision!

These sites can have differing opinions from each other on content & cheese off other members because they aren't ultimately tied to each other, but the differing views and opinions are very healthy to the organization.

For the record, sites so far are generally waiting for a big player to join before becoming official members. I get the impression some are still waiting for that sugar daddy that isn't coming. It's not 1998 anymore guys. Back to basics!

We are building a replacement, themes4u.org. Many people from the late themes.org are involved. Check out some docs I've written for more info. If you have experience on site design, please contact me to join us.

Any ideas are accepted too. I'll be following this thread.

For some of us , themes.org was always disappointing. So some people have already came up wtih alternatives, like http://www.kde-look.org/

Especially since ESR sits on the VA board. I liked themes.org, it served a purpose and it was a fun site. Then things kind of fell apart, seemingly midway through a major rewrite, and there isn't really anything on the site that says much to that extent. I understand the business side of it and things don't always last forever but I would think that there would be some desire to inform the community and maybe send the project elsewhere if someone is willing to take it on.