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What's in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode

freecode.com

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Re: What's in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode

#21

Post by sigil »

supar wrote: post #16

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…

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.

Re: What's in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode

#22

Post by georgemcbay »

asto wrote: post #14
sanswork wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: What's in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode

#23

Post by SageRaven »

sanswork wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: What's in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode

#24

Post by rachelbythebay »

KingOfB wrote: post #17

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 a…

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.

Re: What's in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode

#25

Post by jjanzer »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #24
KingOfB wrote: post #17

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 a…

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.

Re: What's in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode

#26

Post by pixelmonkey »

sanswork wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: What's in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode

#27

Post by viraptor »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #11
roschdal wrote: post #3

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

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 m…

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

Re: What's in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode

#28

Post by viraptor »

moe wrote: post #6

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.
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