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Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

jeffcovey.net

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Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#41

Post by mtdewcmu »

wpietri wrote: post #37
keithpeter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cou…

Hacker News is auto-curated (at least partly). I'm not sure how much faith I would put in an editor, and projects like Ubuntu and Homebrew already act like gatekeepers. It would be valuable to come up with a good way of recording the opinions of the crowd, though, and it would be more cost-effective, too.

Searching for free software on Google Code or Github isn't bad, but they only index their own projects. There might be value in having an index maintained by a neutral third party.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#42

Post by pierlux »

macintux wrote: post #36

I 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.

I remember hitting my first summer job company's content firewall which thought this was a porn site because of the URL lol

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#43

Post by BillyParadise »

You know, it's bad when you remember going to the site, but forgot what you went there for. I thought I remembered it as a daily wacky-news site like fark. I guess I was wrong :)

I'll echo several other replies - it was great - nay, essential - before package managers became good.

Maybe they should have bought and changed their name to yum.com or apt-get.com (instead of freecode) and then more of us would still remember why they went to the site.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#44

Post by mindcrime »

adulau wrote: post #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/ .

That's a good question. The group that are looking at creating a replacement site are definitely interested in this point. ESR commented on his blog that he'd reached out to someone, so we'll see what happens there.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#45

Post by mindcrime »

dspeyer wrote: post #14

ESR is talking about building a replacement http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5948

I have a feeling that more than one replacement initiative will emerge, but the market will sort it out in the end. ESR has a strong preference for doing something in Python, and some people will probably coalesce around that. OTOH, I've started a project for a potential replacement codebase, based on Grails + Groovy.

If anybody is interested: https://github.com/mindcrime/sourcehub

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#46

Post by taspeotis »

I'm not sure what Dice Holdings thought they'd achieve by buying Geeknet. Last time I checked, they were busy curating slashvertisements and Business Intelligence "insight" articles for Slashdot.

I wonder how that's working out for them...

http://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=Slashdot%2C%20%2Fm...

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#47

Post by mattl »

jstsch wrote: post #17
Gracana wrote: 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/

Looks an awful lot like reddit.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#48

Post by chrissnell »

liedra wrote: post #9

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 als…

What I remember most about that era was some guys that ran themes.org who lived up in Tahoe and worked. I was living in Texas at the time and wanted so badly to be able to work remotely from a ski town. Virtually nobody got to work remotely back in 2000. Years later, I finally got my wish and moved to Park City, UT and lived that life. Good times. I can only imagine how much fun it must have been in the big-money dotcom days.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#49

Post by chrissnell »

js2 wrote: 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…

Remember the post on Slashdot about suddenly becoming rich from the VA IPO? Can't remember if it was Rob Malda or Eric Raymond or someone else but it seemed so unreal and ostentatious at the time but was completely laughable just a few years later.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#50

Post by nl »

chrissnell wrote: post #49
js2 wrote: 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…

Remember the post on Slashdot about suddenly becoming rich from the VA IPO? Can't remember if it was Rob Malda or Eric Raymond or someone else but it seemed so unreal and ostentatious at the time but was completely laughable just a few years later.

Eric Raymond: "Surprised By Wealth"[1], and "How I'll spend my millions"[2]

[1] http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/1999121000105NWLF

[2] http://www.zdnet.com/eric-raymond-how-ill-spend-my-millions-...

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