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Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014 (jeffcovey.net)

280 points by ingve ↗ HN
Includes an interesting comment from ESR:

http://jeffcovey.net/2014/06/19/freshmeat-net-1997-2014/comment-page-1/#comment-2111

77 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] thread
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.

the_eradicator
It was an invaluable resource for obtaining open source software at the time, especially if one was using a smaller distribution like Slackware. In highlighting new releases, it also seemed to help sustain the excitement of consuming and exploring the software, at least in my recollection.
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/ works pretty well for JS libraries. You might find it useful.

ris
"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 without resources like freshmeat, how are the packagers supposed to find out about new software to package. There is still one hell of a lot more unpackaged software than there is packaged, and finding it is going to become ever more difficult.

I'm personally quite annoyed by freshmeat's shutdown - I still checked it every (other) day.

blablabla123
"I'm personally quite annoyed by freshmeat's shutdown - I still checked it every (other) day."

Wow. Yeah, but good point about the package maintainers. I think there is this weird mechanism, products targeted towards a large consumer audience tend to be much better than products targeted to the "producer side".

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....
blablabla123
Actually the coolest thing was the catalogue. When you clicked on browse, all apps and libs were sorted by category. And you could search the categories and even have search parameters like code maturity. (From Alpha to Mature IIRC)
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/
mattl
Looks an awful lot like reddit.
buster
I remember that i had freshmeat on my bookmark bar and browsed it every day once for new stuff. The old design really was MUCH better.
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.

ebiester
I thought it was redhat that popped at 300 and disbursed shares.
js2
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geeknet#Initial_public_offeri...

RHAT shares merely tripled a few months earlier:

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-229679.html

I don't recall whether Redhat offered F&F shares widely like VA did.

edit: apparently RHAT did:

http://www.salon.com/1999/08/13/redhat_shares_2/

I didn't realize it was so contentious. Anyway, I got in on the LNUX IPO, not the RHAT one.

lusis
Yep. I got in on the RHAT F&F deal thanks to some bug reports and a patch here and there.

I made the stupid mistake of allowing coworkers to buy some shares through me but I wasn't fully aware of the tax burden. Basically everything I made myself went in to paying the taxes on everyone else's shit. What little was left I had to give to my family to help with other bullshit.

Patrick_Devine
I participated in both. The RHAT IPO was tricky because a lot of us were new to investing and there was a requirement to prove otherwise. This was regardless of whether you were willing to put up with the risk. Keep in mind that this was when online trading was in its relative infancy; there just wasn't the kind of access to information about trading that we enjoy these days.
np422
As I recall, you numbers are correct, I was also invited to the IPO, but since I'm not an US citizen - the SEC made me jump through many hoops before I was allowed to buy something. I've never been much of an administrative minded person so I got bored halfway and never got around to buy any. I actually went through all of the doc-com bubble and y2k-mania without any substantial personal financial gain.

A few of my classmates from my university registered a funny domain name and made something that could be mistaken for a website, consisting mostly of static html-pages and sold that to some venture capitalists and they are still living of the capital from that sale.

So unlike you, I'm still kind of bitter about my missed VA-linux IPO....

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.
davidw
You're not alone in not having done the smart thing and sold immediately. Argh!
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.

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.
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
Given I'm here on a work visa, I'd rather not have much cause for authorities to look closely at me until I've gone for citizenship :-)
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.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
keithpeter
"and I highly doubt they'll give you personal problems for visiting"

Er - are you living in the UK?

chrissnell
What I remember most about that era was some guys that ran themes.org who lived up in Tahoe and worked. I was living in Texas at the time and wanted so badly to be able to work remotely from a ski town. Virtually nobody got to work remotely back in 2000. Years later, I finally got my wish and moved to Park City, UT and lived that life. Good times. I can only imagine how much fun it must have been in the big-money dotcom days.
zeruch
That was Trae and Co. Much as I liked the guy the "fame" he got went way to his head and his contributions were far short of his ambitions. He alienated a lot of folks with his constant demands for what would otherwise be perks for senior engineers (or higher), and mid-day snowboarding excursion... and -to be brutally honest- preening when he visited HQ.

Last I heard he's settled down some and does good work back in his home territory in Georgia.

dspeyer
ESR is talking about building a replacement

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 ?
vidarh
Ohloh might be good alternative if it was not so focused on tracking metrics and contributors rather than information more interesting to users.
mtdewcmu
Looks like an interesting site. Thanks
mindcrime
I have a feeling that more than one replacement initiative will emerge, but the market will sort it out in the end. ESR has a strong preference for doing something in Python, and some people will probably coalesce around that. OTOH, I've started a project for a potential replacement codebase, based on Grails + Groovy.

If anybody is interested: https://github.com/mindcrime/sourcehub

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/.

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.
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
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.
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)

im3w1l
RIP. I have fond memories of freshmeat.
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.
zeruch
VA as its initial raison d'etre went dead with the purging of the hardware division (disclosure, I am a biased bastard who worked at VA from 1998 - 2002 and have a deep romanticized attachment to the people and events of that period). Everything after was something pretending to it (or in the case of Sourceforge.net for several years, surviving as a remnant in an otherwise unrelated shell).
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.

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

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

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.
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!!!"
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. :(
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.

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.

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...

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.

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