What's in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode | Hacker News Reader

What's in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode

freecode.com

114 pointsstesch30 comments

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.

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.

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.

From time to time when I'm looking for an application for some particular task, I search freshmeat. The last time I checked it I was looking for an Ascii drawing tool, and found several such good tools.

I use them for occasional code surfing.

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

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.

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.

I visit once a week to view the projects that have been updated over the week. Keeps me aware of new projects and up to date on the status of stuff that I use every day but might not otherwise know how its progressing.

Personally, I'm kinda bummed about the the change of name.

I think freshmeat/freecode used to serve a niche that has now been filled by the open source community and the web itself. When announcements for new code releases used to happen on mailing lists and download links used to be tarballs, it was relevant to have a feed to notify you of new releases.

Now, new code releases happen at places like github, google code, and bitbucket, and the releases are almost immediately pushed upstream to package maintainers / repositories, blogs, twitter accounts, etc. Therefore, rather than a rebrand, I think what they really need to do is accept that their time is no longer here and go for a deadpool. Hard pill to swallow, perhaps, but probably the best medicine.

Made me think of AppWatch, a similar site which was curated by the owners to include only high-quality open-source, and was acquired by CNet in 2001: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cnet-networks-acquir...

Relive the glory: http://web.archive.org/web/20010629001952/http://appwatch.co...

Sadly, it's just redirecting to zdnet.com now.

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.

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...

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.

The logo doesn't load, unfortunately. Do you have a screenshot or mirror?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Similar move was "ColdStorage" to "SourceForge".

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

I liked the original Freshmeat too. It feels a bit too generic now.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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