

Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014 - ingve
http://jeffcovey.net/2014/06/19/freshmeat-net-1997-2014/
Includes an interesting comment from ESR:<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jeffcovey.net&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;19&#x2F;freshmeat-net-1997-2014&#x2F;comment-page-1&#x2F;#comment-2111
======
liedra
I was an editor for freshmeat back in the early 2000s and it was a lot of fun.
I was there when fm acquired themes.org and was one of the main people tasked
with ensuring the HUGE db of themes was sanely migrated into the fm backend.
We had stupidly high standards, and I don't think a lot of people really knew
how much we threw out over the years, or how much we sanitised the entries (so
much broken English!). We also had to (to a certain degree) sanity check the
projects - make sure they looked like they did what they did. One of the best
projects I ever had to say no to was a "next-gen compression tool" which came
during a bit of a fad for these in the early 2000s and basically converted
everything to binary and got rid of the 0s. (Not surprisingly, there wasn't an
"unzip" tool!) Nice try, guy!

Another story I remember is all the flak we got when we opened the
osx.freshmeat.net section - we got so much criticism about how we'd sold out
etc. etc. but it actually turned out to be quite a good repository for OS X
apps for a while until iTunes kinda took over.

Good times :D

~~~
contingencies
Wow, never knew you did that! Hey, since you're in the UK, and he's just
passed his two year anniversary, as a fellow Aussie you should make some
academic excuses and go visit Assange in London already. I'm sure he'd enjoy
catching up on your area.

(Re: reply. Err .. as an ethicist I'm not sure how you actually wrote that! If
push came to shove - and I highly doubt they'll give you personal problems for
visiting - have you no faith in your institution to protect you? Talk about
chilling effects... you have to _make sure_ you go now, so you maintain some
self respect and score a fun lecture lead-in!)

~~~
liedra
Yes, I'm an ethicist, but I also am a realist. In the current HE environment
in the UK having a "permanent job" means very little these days. I'm all for
bucking the system, but I have to be able to be in the system to effect
change, and a lot of that isn't through token activities like this but working
to change policy and governance structures (and educate the next generation!).
I'd rather have a solid base from which to do that sort of thing than the
ability to lose everything. It's not a whistleblower situation, I have nothing
apart from a good story to really gain from meeting with him, and it's not
particularly a principle thing because I think you have to pick your battles,
and this isn't one of the ones I've picked.

~~~
contingencies
It greatly saddens me to read this, C. Best of luck with your future battles,
whatever they may be.

------
stonogo
Freshmeat stopped being useful when they converted the well-organized and
useful software trove into a worthless pile of tag garbage, _and deleted a
third of the information in the process_.

Before, it was possible to find, for example, a TUI email client written in
perl with a BSD license, thanks to the ability to drill down into the trove.
After the redesign, it was goddamn near impossible to find anything --
especially things with specific licenses.

I, and just about everyone I know who used it, stopped using it not long after
they started focusing on toy web programming more than information curation.
I'm sad they mismanaged it to death, but I'm not going to miss it in its
terminal state.

~~~
mariuz
I usually updated the firebird page before the big update but it bacame
useless and painfull to the the page updates after the redesign

For example befora i could do releases for beta and stable versions but after
i had just kind of worthless tags also i had svn branches for each kind of
relases

[http://freecode.com/projects/firebird](http://freecode.com/projects/firebird)

I guess in time also sourforge will die , almost all open source development
is moved to github these days

------
js2
For the LNUX IPO, VA made F&F shares available to anyone who had contributed
to Linux. They were fairly liberal in how they interpreted this, and I think
the contribution I used to justify my purchase was the "-e" switch to
chpasswd.

Anyway, as I recall I was able to purchase 140 shares at $30. The day of the
IPO it hit $300+ and I was too stupid to sell (gotta get those long term
capital gains rates..doh). I finally sold those shares years later at
something like $1.

Oh well. You win some you lose some.

~~~
chrissnell
Remember the post on Slashdot about suddenly becoming rich from the VA IPO?
Can't remember if it was Rob Malda or Eric Raymond or someone else but it
seemed so unreal and ostentatious at the time but was completely laughable
just a few years later.

~~~
nl
Eric Raymond: "Surprised By Wealth"[1], and "How I'll spend my millions"[2]

[1]
[http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/1999121000105NWLF](http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/1999121000105NWLF)

[2] [http://www.zdnet.com/eric-raymond-how-ill-spend-my-
millions-...](http://www.zdnet.com/eric-raymond-how-ill-spend-my-
millions-3002075791/)

------
Gracana
Here's an old archive.org snapshot for anyone who (like me) had trouble
recalling what freshmeat was all about:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20050301154742/http://freshmeat....](https://web.archive.org/web/20050301154742/http://freshmeat.net/)

~~~
jstsch
Funny how great that looks, even now. Of course, style-wise it's a bit dated
(style in the sense of web-fashion). But at the same time, the content is very
easy to scan and descriptions are short, to the point and quite consistent. I
mean, compare this to...
[https://packages.debian.org/stable/mail/](https://packages.debian.org/stable/mail/)

~~~
mattl
Looks an awful lot like reddit.

------
blablabla123
Actually the site used to be really useful. Somehow I forgot using it though.
One day Ubuntu came out, the package manager (including dep mgmt) worked
really well and there was a ton of great software in the repository.

But in the tar xzf ... ; ./configure && make && sudo make install time it was
really nice.

I wished something like that existed for JS libraries.

~~~
nathanstitt
Right there with you. Back in the "compile it yourself" days of Linux,
freshmeat was the place to look.

I find [http://jsdb.io/](http://jsdb.io/) works pretty well for JS libraries.
You might find it useful.

~~~
blablabla123
Thanks for the link, looks nicely sorted.

~~~
sitkack
The same thing for extremely small JS libraries,
[http://microjs.com/#](http://microjs.com/#)

------
matt__rose
Interesting perspective from esr on the rationale behind the takeover of
Andover in the comments

~~~
petercooper
_the U.S.’s crazy accounting rules more or less forced us to do an acquisition
to maintain our valuation_

Can anyone explain this and whether it's still relevant?

~~~
robryk
esr's explanation and resulting discussion:

[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5945&cpage=1#comment-887355](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5945&cpage=1#comment-887355)

------
macintux
I recall my then-wife looking over my shoulder as my web browser auto-
completed "freshmeat.net". Unsurprisingly, she immediately grew suspicious and
expected to see a porn site pop up.

An institution for a very long time, definitely something from a different
era. Farewell old friend.

~~~
pierlux
I remember hitting my first summer job company's content firewall which
thought this was a porn site because of the URL lol

~~~
liedra
I remember having to go home and tell my mum I now worked for freshmeat.net,
looking at her face, then realising ... "NO! It's not a porn site!!!"

------
Zelphyr
"always heard that ThinkGeek, the online retailer, was by far the most (only?)
profitable part of the business for years on end"

As a former employee of [VA [Research[ Systems]|Linux|Software] SourceForge] I
also heard this. Though I believe Slashdot was also a profit center for
awhile.

~~~
bane
This is correct. TG basically carried the entire rest of the company for
_many_ years. Almost nothing else made enough money to support itself and the
profits TG pulled in were enough to run the company for a long while. This was
back when TG was still a pretty small outfit. As they've grown employee-wise,
I'm sure more of the revenue has gone to sustaining this part of the business.

The basic problem is that so many of the other properties were virtually
impossible to monetize and/or by the time attention got turned on them
audience had moved elsewhere and the result was a mess.

It also didn't help that many of the senior people brought in to help turn the
properties into money making operations really had never done business with
this demographic.

------
zeruch
I used to check FM every morning for years as part of my ritual to look for
"neat stuff" to install and play around with on my various boxen. It was great
while it lasted. I worked at VA and a common form of watercooler talk in the
late 90s was akin to "hey, I found $APP and I think it might really let me do
$USEFULTHING or at least be an interesting waste of time"

~~~
harrystone
Same here, I checked it every day for many years. It was one of those
fundamental parts of the linux experience in the late 90s.

It surprised me how much emotional impact this announcement had for me. I hate
to see freshmeat go, even if it wasn't much anymore compared to what it was.
Oh well, you can't go home again.

~~~
vidarh
It would have had more of an emotional impact if I hadn't checked in on it now
and again over the last few years, and essentially "grieved" already by
realising how uninteresting it had become. Largely because I have so many
other channels to discover interesting stuff without the chaff of a new
version of yet another irc client.

Also, when they tried to transition away from "Freshmeat", I pretty much
accepted it was over...

------
dspeyer
ESR is talking about building a replacement

[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5948](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5948)

~~~
keithpeter
Well, I wish him and anyone who gets involved every success.

However, contrast esr

 _" Freshmeat/freecode required that every project creations and release be
pre-moderated by humans. This was a serious bottleneck, and may have been the
site’s undoing by imposing staffing costs on the operators. We need to avoid
this."_

with the highest level post by user liedra above who worked for the original
project...

 _" We had stupidly high standards, and I don't think a lot of people really
knew how much we threw out over the years, or how much we sanitised the
entries (so much broken English!). We also had to (to a certain degree) sanity
check the projects - make sure they looked like they did what they did."_

Am I thinking that we are collectively saying we can't afford to add value
through curation or editing?

~~~
wpietri
Hmmm. I think ESR's talk of cost is a bad framing to use when thinking about
businesses; I think in terms of value creation and sustainability.

If we imagine two sites, one with manual curating and editing and one without,
the former's clearly more valuable. The question for me is whether the value
created is enough that we can extract enough cash in return to make it
sustainable. If you eliminate the editors, it could be that the lowered value
makes the business less sustainable, not more so.

Either way, I think ESR's view is an interesting hypothesis, but it's one I'd
definitely test. But I'd also test the hypothesis that the Freshmeat model
just doesn't make sense any more, in that people who previously used it now
solve their problems in other, better ways.

~~~
mtdewcmu
Hacker News is auto-curated (at least partly). I'm not sure how much faith I
would put in an editor, and projects like Ubuntu and Homebrew already act like
gatekeepers. It would be valuable to come up with a good way of recording the
opinions of the crowd, though, and it would be more cost-effective, too.

Searching for free software on Google Code or Github isn't bad, but they only
index their own projects. There might be value in having an index maintained
by a neutral third party.

~~~
walterbell
How about [https://www.ohloh.net](https://www.ohloh.net) ?

~~~
vidarh
Ohloh might be good alternative if it was not so focused on tracking metrics
and contributors rather than information more interesting to users.

------
ben1040
It's amusing how VA has gone from a company that made and sold Linux systems,
to a company that makes and sells funny T-shirts to people who use Linux
systems.

~~~
Patrick_Devine
This pains a lot of us who used to work at VA. It was a combination of the dot
com bubble bursting and mismanagement which caused everything to implode. I
remember saying at the time "if we can't make money during the largest
economic upswing ever, when the hell are we going to make money?"

I think if we'd had any kind of fiscal responsibility we might have been able
to survive the rocky years. At the time though, the idea was to ditch
manufacturing and put everything behind SourceForge. In retrospect, that
probably wasn't a _horrible_ idea, except for that someone got the bright idea
that the only way to for SourceForge to make money was to sell banner ads. I
think GitHub proved that was a bad idea.

------
inDigiNeous
Ah, freshmeat.net, one of those essential sites back in the day, when
Slashdot.org was still relevant, when Slackware Linux was something cool to
use and when compiling source by hand was a fun thing to do.

I used to scroll down the front page every day, looking at some cool new
projects to test out.

Uploaded my first Open Source project, umix.sf.net, there too. Was really fun
to see people downloading my software and see the statistics for how many
clicks it had gotten.

Good time to kill it already, didn't even remember it still existing.

------
taspeotis
I'm not sure what Dice Holdings thought they'd achieve by buying Geeknet. Last
time I checked, they were busy curating slashvertisements and Business
Intelligence "insight" articles for Slashdot.

I wonder how that's working out for them...

[http://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=Slashdot%2C%20%2Fm...](http://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=Slashdot%2C%20%2Fm%2F02p0tdp%2C%20%2Fm%2F02vvdrt&cmpt=q)

------
adulau
The dataset/database of freshmeat/code is quite interesting on a historical
perspective of free software. Do you think that the owner would be able to
share freely the database? Someone in contact with them?

This would be a nice addition to [http://ckan.org/](http://ckan.org/).

~~~
mindcrime
That's a good question. The group that are looking at creating a replacement
site are definitely interested in this point. ESR commented on his blog that
he'd reached out to someone, so we'll see what happens there.

------
jimwalsh
That was an interesting article to read. I have many fond memories of the very
early days of Freshmeat and my introduction to OSS and Linux. Freshmeat helped
people share their products and was a great place to find new and upcoming
projects to check out or even help on.

I feel like the late 90s was such a Wild West time for Linux. Linux is in a
great spot now, best it has ever been, but for whatever reason the community
just feels incredibly different for me now. It's probably just me aging.

~~~
jcd748
There was definitely a feel of do-it-yourself, especially when installing
Linux meant either wiping a partition, or trying to resize an existing one
with very primitive tools. I remember using a weird variant called DOSLinux
for a while, because my 486 couldn't handle the "real" distros, and then
getting a new 350MHz machine and getting RedHat 6 installed. Then realizing I
could use X, spending endless hours on themes.net, tweaking WindowMaker and
finding new themes, and doing the Web 1.0 by learning perl to write a simple
blogging engine.

You're right, though. Different times, and the community feels very different.
The feel I get when I'm browsing web forums for answers to questions is a lot
of kids who use Linux because it's somehow "cool", and certainly it's
ridiculously easy to install these days. But I might just be making
assumptions based on the terrible grammar and incomplete sentences.

------
BillyParadise
You know, it's bad when you remember going to the site, but forgot what you
went there for. I thought I remembered it as a daily wacky-news site like
fark. I guess I was wrong :)

I'll echo several other replies - it was great - nay, essential - before
package managers became good.

Maybe they should have bought and changed their name to yum.com or apt-get.com
(instead of freecode) and then more of us would still remember why they went
to the site.

------
giis
At-least farewell mail to users would have been nice. I had around 5-6
projects with 70-80 subscribes at freshmeat.net . I'll be extremely glad, If
freshmeat.net allowed its users to inform their project subscriber a 'big
thank you' note for their support.

Thank you Freshmeat.net (aka freecode.com)

------
booleanbetrayal
RIP ... i actually did one of the earlier freshmeat logos back before it had
its own proper domain.

[https://web.archive.org/web/19980419152907/http://freshmeat....](https://web.archive.org/web/19980419152907/http://freshmeat.unreal.org/)

------
rg3
Wow. I was still using it to monitor new releases of iotop. I think this is
going to be shocking news for anyone who was running Linux or BSDs in the
early 2000s.

~~~
giis
Yes, you are right its a shcok, I used to monitor new releases of few project
via freshmeat. :(

------
jamespo
Still remember the days when I used to religiously read their NNTP feed, until
it got shut down. Still subscribe to the RSS, not for much longer I guess.

------
im3w1l
RIP. I have fond memories of freshmeat.

------
edwintorok
Is something wrong with the CSS on freecode.com? It looks very different from
how it used to be.

~~~
nandhp
They seem to have accidentally deleted it.

~~~
edwintorok
Seems fixed now.

------
fithisux
Disaster. I was relying on them for keeping my Windows 7 FOSS installation
updated. I did not use proprietary except windows (of course) and ccleaner /
skype. Simply disaster. I have to rely now on SF feeds/Filehippo and QT-
apps.org

------
natch
Writers, please don't assume your readers know what you are talking about. It
is your job to explain it. The article should have started with a short
explanation of what freshmeat was.

~~~
nacs
The very first sentence of the article contains a Wikipedia link that explains
it:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshmeat](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshmeat)

~~~
natch
Good point, upvoted. I missed that link, but stand by my point for writers in
general. A short inline explanation is always helpful, with or without a link
to more.

------
inanutshellus
Oh thank god. I misread it as Red Meat had closed operations.
([http://www.redmeat.com/max-cannon/FreshMeat](http://www.redmeat.com/max-
cannon/FreshMeat))

Whew.

