It's amusing how VA has gone from a company that made and sold Linux systems, to a company that makes and sells funny T-shirts to people who use Linux systems.
Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014
31–40 of 78 posts
Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014
#32Interesting 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?
esr's explanation and resulting discussion:
Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014
#33ESR is talking about building a replacement http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5948
Well, I wish him and anyone who gets involved every success.
However, contrast esr
"Freshmeat/freecode required that every project creations and release be pre-moderated by humans. This was a serious bottleneck, and may have been the site’s undoing by imposing staffing costs on the operators. We need to avoid this."
with the highest level post by user liedra above who worked for the original project...
"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."
Am I thinking that we are collectively saying we can't afford to add value through curation or editing?
Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014
#34Freshmeat stopped being useful when they converted the well-organized and useful software trove into a worthless pile of tag garbage, and deleted a third of the information in the process.
Before, it was possible to find, for example, a TUI email client written in perl with a BSD license, thanks to the ability to drill down into the trove. After the redesign, it was goddamn near impossible to find anything -- especially things with specific licenses.
I, and just about everyone I know who used it, stopped using it not long after they started focusing on toy web programming more than information curation. I'm sad they mismanaged it to death, but I'm not going to miss it in its terminal state.
Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014
#35Still remember the days when I used to religiously read their NNTP feed, until it got shut down. Still subscribe to the RSS, not for much longer I guess.
Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014
#36I recall my then-wife looking over my shoulder as my web browser auto-completed "freshmeat.net". Unsurprisingly, she immediately grew suspicious and expected to see a porn site pop up.
An institution for a very long time, definitely something from a different era. Farewell old friend.
Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014
#37ESR is talking about building a replacement http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5948
Well, I wish him and anyone who gets involved every success. However, contrast esr "Freshmeat/freecode required that every project creations and release be pre-moderated by humans. This was a serious bottleneck, and may have been the site’s undoing by imposing staffing costs on the operators. We need to avoid this." with the highest level post by user liedra above who worked for the original project... "We had stupid…
Hmmm. I think ESR's talk of cost is a bad framing to use when thinking about businesses; I think in terms of value creation and sustainability.
If we imagine two sites, one with manual curating and editing and one without, the former's clearly more valuable. The question for me is whether the value created is enough that we can extract enough cash in return to make it sustainable. If you eliminate the editors, it could be that the lowered value makes the business less sustainable, not more so.
Either way, I think ESR's view is an interesting hypothesis, but it's one I'd definitely test. But I'd also test the hypothesis that the Freshmeat model just doesn't make sense any more, in that people who previously used it now solve their problems in other, better ways.
Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014
#38Wow. I was still using it to monitor new releases of iotop. I think this is going to be shocking news for anyone who was running Linux or BSDs in the early 2000s.
Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014
#39Writers, please don't assume your readers know what you are talking about. It is your job to explain it. The article should have started with a short explanation of what freshmeat was.
The very first sentence of the article contains a Wikipedia link that explains it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshmeat
Good point, upvoted. I missed that link, but stand by my point for writers in general. A short inline explanation is always helpful, with or without a link to more.
Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014
#40"always heard that ThinkGeek, the online retailer, was by far the most (only?) profitable part of the business for years on end"
As a former employee of [VA [Research[ Systems]|Linux|Software] SourceForge] I also heard this. Though I believe Slashdot was also a profit center for awhile.