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MCS: Source files released!

Another milestone for MCS project has been reached! And its a big one!

If you open http://hg.mozilla.org/webtools/mcs/file/tip/theme/source/ you will find full source PSD files of the theme.

picture-41

What does it mean? Well, this is another step on the way of making sure that we have a really good theme that is open to everyone according to what we understand as Open. And understanding of it is not that common.

Think of it. How many open themes do you know. There are a lot of themes that you can download for free, but that’s not making them open, right? Next, there are themes that may provide sources, even on open licenses, which makes them technically open but does it make it easy to work with. Its almost like opening sources of a software, but not making the sources readable, not helping with hacking them, not providing documentation, and build environment… If you track all open projects out there, they usually take a lot of time to open their projects exactly because re-licensing sources is not enough. Because it will not make people want to use it and contribute to it.

Because in order to get this kind of activity around your project, there’s much more that needs to be done, and the source files for MCS are exactly doing this. It’s not only theme, it’s a theme with PSD files there, and the PSD files are licensed on Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Share-Alike and it is ready to be modified. The source has all the layers properly grouped to make working on theme sections easy and natural. It has guidelines that help you keep the scheme in shape while modifying and it makes it easy to change colors or elements that you will likely to want to modify. It is a fully open source theme, and we have an example implementations there to show you, but you can change it however you like and come up with your own implementations.

We will provide tutorials on how to do this, and we hope to see people modify it in creative way and upstreaming their changes to make the theme look even better in result of community effort!

I would like to thank Legal Team in Mozilla (Catherine, Harvey), Tara and Seth for making this possible!

I may be wrong, but I think this is the first case ever of opening the theme this way. I would love to see other examples, but it I think we’re just opening a new chapter with both, Mozilla Community Theme and Mozilla Community Sites – since I think no other project is offering such powerful tools for its communities to develop themselves around their own websites.  Mozilla is leading  🙂

p.s. if there’s someone who knows how to port psd file to gimp xcf without loosing… everything in the file, then I’d love to get your help!