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Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

jeffcovey.net

11–20 of 78 posts

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#11

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.

Thanks for the link, looks nicely sorted.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#13
post #4

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....

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)

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#15
post #5

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…

I thought it was redhat that popped at 300 and disbursed shares.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#16

Interesting perspective from esr on the rationale behind the takeover of Andover in the comments

the U.S.’s crazy accounting rules more or less forced us to do an acquisition to maintain our valuation

Can anyone explain this and whether it's still relevant?

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#17
post #4

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....

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/

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#18
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/.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#19
post #5

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…

I thought it was redhat that popped at 300 and disbursed shares.

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.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the link, looks nicely sorted.

The same thing for extremely small JS libraries, http://microjs.com/#
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