Darkbee is right about the mention of this before...I remember having doubts about the Ads at the time...and he's certainly right about the amount of work Vaztr has clearly put in to this project.
Although I somehow seem to have been cast as one of the 'Bad Boys' in this matter, I have always been supportive of the concept, and I hope Vaztr hasn't abandoned this completely because it would be a positive contribution to the community, and could be a valuable resource.
My problem is, perhaps, the way it's been done. This community has always been 'democratic' and based on consensus, and I genuinely feel that had this been discussed in more detail before it went too far, all these objections and problems could have been resolved.
In particular, I do feel that this should have been done more on an 'opt-in' basis, where authors were either invited to participate, or at least were contacted to check inclusion was OK.
Also the early technical problems didn't help.
There has been a lot of discussion about the legalities and licenses of OXPs lately, and I appreciate that many of the OXPs most in need of this type of support might be the more difficult ones to deal with in this respect.
There is no simple solution to this, but a bit of effort would probably have yielded results. And that is the problem with a project like this. Vaztr has already put in a lot of effort compiling the table in the first place, and to expect anyone to contact every single OXP author (assuming they are still around to be contacted) is unreasonable. Perhaps it should have been a more collaborative venture.
So we are left with a now-withdrawn mirror site, a p****d-off member and lots of controversy.
Can we salvage anything from this? I hope so because as I've always maintained this is basically a Good Idea.
If I might make a suggestion - Vaztr, please don't give up on this, but come back and make a request for authors to OK the inclusion of their work in your mirror site. I expect most would happily do this. Think about the Ad issue and see if there is a way round it, perhaps look at the box.net model which I think everyone finds acceptable (as opposed to those download sites that hit you with a giant technicolor pop-up before you download), and just bounce things off the community as you go along.
Your efforts are appreciated, although you may not think so at the moment, and this is too good an idea to let die.
