OpenSource.com is Not Coming Back
WAY back in June IBM (Red Hat) said that it would have an announcement to make about the future of OpenSource.com. It said it would have this announcement within a month, i.e. in early July, but nothing was said until this week. To put all this in perspective, Red Hat laid off a lot of people in April and by the end of April it seemed like OpenSource.com was drying up (it had been posting about 2 stories per day up until that point). Then in May it effectively pulled the plug and Techrights reported, based on inside sources, that the site was in serious trouble and would not publish articles even for longtime volunteers. It would not even comment on the site's status. The post from Techrights became somewhat "viral" and within 1-3 days (in June) IBM issued a face-saving statement with rather vague wording. The message was full of waffle. Ever since then Techrights kept reminding people that IBM wasn't keeping its promise or meeting deadlines (July).
OpenSource.com used to publish about 10 articles per week and had dedicated staff working as editors. The OSI has hardly any staff at all; the few who exist are just paid by Microsoft to promote Microsoft's proprietary software (from within the OSI -- a complete sellout, undermining the mission of the OSI), so only a wishful thinker would believe that OpenSource.net/OpenSource.com/OpenSource.org can replace what OpenSource.com used to be. It took 4-5 months for this face-saving stunt (one single blog post), so can we expect 50 high-quality articles per month? Most of the blog posts from OpenSource.org seem to be sponsored by Microsoft and some are even authored by Microsoft staff.
The bottom line is, as Techrights noted before, IBM decided to get rid of OpenSource.com and another Web site ("Enterprisers Project"). OpenSource.com is finished. It's not coming back.
The domain will stay there, serving pages. But will they publish 10 or so articles per week like before? No. Face-saving move by IBM.
They say "OpenSource.net launched as a new home," but why not use the original domain? Just adopting another domain isn't the solution.