The editorservers for the project are already offline for more than a month now, since 10.20. Besides the notice that a temporary problem exists and that they are working at full speed to fix it, there has been no official response from either DMoz or their owners AOL.
Sure, a hardware defect can always happen. Though projects which are dear to their operators will either have a contingency plan for such a case or they would react quickly in restoring the functionality of the system. And I am rather sure that they are not using such exotic hardware that it would be extremely hard or lengthy to acquire .
Seeing how, for one month, nothing has happened or, at least, how there is no press release about the progress of the recovery attempt, I can only arrive at the conclusion that AOL is planning to let DMoz die. And I do not mean the clean option where they will just come out and say that they are not interested in a project anymore that is only costing money but the dirty method of just not giving a damn anymore. Sad, for the engine and for the work the editors put into it. Maybe someone will fork DMoz on the base of their current files and keep the project running. There are enough possibilities to revive the project. Let us just hope that if that happens it will be with owners who are committed to it.
