The Antidesktop aside, but I'm missing freshmeat website. It seems that most open source stuff is advertised now on www.openhub.net but I'm not sure if this still have the same spirit.
IMO the best thing they can do for freshmeat is restore the old pages and layout. There was some really good, hard-to-find information on that site.
I don't understand this comment ...
First, my experience is that most open source software is now on github.
Second, I feel that github is infinitely better in every way than freshmeat was.
There was a lot of dreaming during that time (late 90s/early 2000s) of what we could accomplish in the OSS communities. Slowly community projects became part of foundations or startup/corporate controlled. Gimp never took the place of Photoshop, and many of the lofty ideas about open source really started to fade:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-...
I love Github, but it doesn't serve the same purpose. (Neither does openhub).
What was great about Freshmeat was being able to go to the front page every morning and scan through the new releases and discover new cool projects or releases of important software.
If anything, while Freshmeat would be vastly harder to do right today, it'd also potentially be a far better project today given how much more open source software is out there, but it'd need to be run by someone willing to do a lot of work to either let people customise what appears on their front page or enforcing a strong editorial policy to pick the most interesting updates rather than just spew everything... That worked back when "everything" was little enough for people to skim through everything, but not today.
That said, like others, I too miss it in a mostly abstract way, in that I first realised it had stopped updating long after it happened - like e.g. Slashdot, I'd slowly checked it less and less and until it stopped being part of my daily routine. I'm glad they've kept it there as a historical artefact at least, and hope it stays as a reminder.