

What's in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode - stesch
http://freecode.com/articles/whats-in-a-name

======
supar
Freshmeat used to be a milestone of opensource software for a long time. It
offered a good service for developers, including APIs, to publish your
software and have it categorized. You hit the frontpage for every version,
which would be a very nice publicity boost even for scarcely known
applications. If you search through Ubuntu/Debian's repository you can still
find a lot of helpers to "release" on freshmeat, which should give you an idea
of how much freshmeat was entrenched in FOSS.

As an user, freshmeat was great. You could search by category, release type,
language, environment, etc. Pretty much everything that was afterwards
integrated in the sourceforge "trove" was pioneered by freshmeat. It was my
go-to source for software just after an "apt search". Yeah, the look was
funky, but who cares? Most of the software was so technical that many simply
didn't care.

Google would (and still does) return too much crap for pretty much any query
regarding software, whereas freshmeat offered immediate insight though
filtering, categorization and project statistics. I've found so many gems on
freshmeat that I would have never have found in Google (because of the sheer
amount of results - mine being always one of the last ones), stackoverflow
(field is too narrow) or github (which basically restricts to software
developed with git, and is often incomplete).

They decided to redesign it a couple of years ago, and while they were at it
they decided to throw away anything that was still good about it: search. Of
course, the new trend was tag clouds, so you can guess, now projects are now
categorized by tags. As such, it's now pretty much impossible to guess the
correct tag/tags for a project. It's either a tag with a different spelling or
a different word altogether. The tagging process is also too liberal: in the
old freshmeat, you were encouraged to categorize your software in several
hierarchical groups. As such, many projects would have a proper "programming
language" category filled it, a proper "operating environment" (like command
line, X11), etc. Searching was a breeze just because you were guided during
the categorization.

Now it's basically the same as a google search: you either have too many
results, or zero. Giving the programmers just a "tags" field to fill it has
resulted in the archive having absolutely no consistency.

It's a shame, really, because there's a lot of niche software (visualization,
scientific tools operating of weird data, a lot of old stuff) that I can still
only find on freshmeat.

I've been thinking myself of re-implementing the old site simply as a rip-off
just to have this archive back. It's sad that all they would think of now is
change the name, because that's _irrelevant_ for the highly technical users
which used to publish/search on freshmeat.

~~~
sigil
_I've found so many gems on freshmeat that I would have never have found in
Google ... stackoverflow (field is too narrow) or github (which basically
restricts to software developed with git, and is often incomplete)._

If there's one thing that freshmeat _still_ has going for it, it's
completeness. It's my first stop when naming a new opensource project.

------
sanswork
I haven't thought of Freshmeat in probably 8 years. Amazing to see that they
are still around. Does anyone here actually actively use them anymore? If so
how? Back in the day I would use it to watch for new releases of different
types of software to try out and experiment with.

~~~
asto
I'm only reminded of their existence when I'm surfing slashdot

~~~
georgemcbay
Same here. And to go one level deeper, I'm only reminded of Slashdot's
existence when someone mentions them on Hacker News or reddit.

~~~
sanswork
To think about how much time I use to spend on slashdot to go to seeing one of
my developers reading it the other month and actually saying "You're who keeps
slashdot around?!". It's a weird feeling.

------
sgt
I think they should have done this namechange years ago. Maybe 10 years ago
when it started fading. And also, they should shift their focus on helping
Linux users find software that is useful to them, i.e. software that is easily
installable on the most popular distributions.

If you go to Freshmeat/Freecode now, and look at the front page, you'll find
obscure libraries, with a "Download" link that takes you to the tarballs. In
my opinion, they should be doing that as well, but they should be doing more
than that.

------
KingOfB
Anyone remember the original freshmeat logo? For the life of me I couldn't
find it, but it was basically a softcore-skin as the background for the
freshmeat text. I looked at the internet archive, and the older sites had a
broken link for the logo.

[http://web.archive.org/web/200011091300/http://freshmeat.net...](http://web.archive.org/web/200011091300/http://freshmeat.net/)

Anyways, seems funny to see them innocently tip toeing around this 'brand
problem' they're having without acknowledging they basically had a softcore-
porn logo for their first year or so.

~~~
rachelbythebay
I kept a few screenshots from the old days. Check out this one from September
28, 1998 (complete with vintage Netscape browser action around it)...

<http://imgur.com/dOXe8>

Edit: it has the logo in question. I thought this was a person who was crowd-
surfing. Yeesh.

~~~
jjanzer
I sent an email to the freshmeat team a really long time ago (around 2001?)
asking them what the image was in the background of it. If I remember
correctly, they said it was an image at Lollapalooza. Unfortunately I don't
have the original email.

------
moe
Freshmeat used to be great in the days of altavista and sourceforge. In the
age of google and github it has become largely irrelevant.

~~~
viraptor
Actually there's still good amount of metadata about a project which github
doesn't provide. But <http://www.ohloh.net/> captured that part pretty well.
Freshmeat was left in the not needed category.

------
callahad
Huh. The "free(code)" wordmark actually feels rather nice. It's imperative.
Free your code! In marked contrast, "freecode" just feels... cheap.

~~~
thwarted
I miss one their early logos, the one with the image of a girl getting a
tattoo. Took me forever to realize what it was with the way it broken up and
obscured with the letters.

------
powertower
Similar move was "ColdStorage" to "SourceForge".

------
roschdal
This is what happens when you have a parent company. The freshmeat brand was
good enough, IMHO.

~~~
SkyMarshal
For hackers maybe, but apparently their target market is larger.

 _"...while numerous sales teams have struggled to position the freshmeat
brand appropriately among potential sponsors in the United States. Outside of
our very own small niche of the Web, people have all sorts of associations
with the name freshmeat, most of which have nothing to do with a free, open
source software directory."_

Eg, no more accidentally mistaking the brand for butcher shops or child porn.

~~~
viraptor
Sometimes it's a good idea. If I had a penny for every time I go to ripe org
instead of net... (NSFW warning)

------
tobylane
Would be a much better name if Freenode didn't exist.

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sixtofour
freecode makes me think of freeware/shareware sites, i.e. there's a fair
amount of dodgyness implied.

------
vineet
Glad to see them trying to reinvigorate the site. Hopefully they will add some
cool ideas to support the OSS community.

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jeswin
Excessive monetization killed it. Users aren't willing to look at distracting
layouts anymore.

------
teyc
The original domain would be worth $$$ to XXXers, considering its page rank.

