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Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

jeffcovey.net

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Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#3

Post by 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.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#5

Post by 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.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#6

Post by 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.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#8

Post by the_eradicator »

blablabla123 wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#9

Post by 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

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#10

Post by nathanstitt »

blablabla123 wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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