Black Mesa Media Release!

Incredible... 10 minutes in and they crashed GamerNode. Completely.

It's sort of back up and going now, though, so check it out!
http://www.blackmesasource.com/

Tons of new screen shots / renders, music (in Downloads), and news!
It all looks and sounds quite beautiful :)
I bet VALVe is feeling pretty sorry they didn't do this themselves. Oh, well.

Apparently another release coming Mid-December. Until them, I am in withdrawal.

Edit:
Never mind that back up and going. The Media sections still work, but it looks like a few more things are dead. Maybe tomorrow the site gfx will be up so it will look a bit better. (Right now it's just a tiny bit of content on top of a white background full of broken images).
Nice to see I'm not the only one using file_get_contents for everything :)

Valve did do Half Life: Source... but they did a half assed job of it. It's avilable via purchase on Steam, but the idea that someone would buy it is laughable since everything looks almost identical to the original game in detail. I think the only things they improved were the characters and weapons. Whatever they improved, it's nothing like this.

Of course they actually released something... Mods like this have a tendancy of not being released.

BM has been in active development for ages now with a huge team of developers, they have gone through tons of hacker attacks, and they have a pretty good ranking on ModDB. Then there's also the astounding achievement that their fan base can bring down GamerNode in 10 minutes...

They have some kind of recognition from VALVe, as they told them to remove the ": Source" subtitle (but they did not tell them to stop building the mod, which says they are fine with its existence).

I guess the BM people could pack it up at random some day, but at this point in time and this far into development it seems unlikely.
Working on a mod like this would look great for future job prospects for those guys, but only if it actually was finished. Not finishing would be a waste of a lot of work.

(Of course, after the public beta stuff, I imagine they'll get rather sick of it as with even the successful mods).

@sswift
Doesn't HL-Source also gives you the ability to enable better visual settings like AA and stuff like that?