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Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

jeffcovey.net

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Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#51

Post by zeruch »

chrissnell wrote: post #48
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 dot…

That was Trae and Co. Much as I liked the guy the "fame" he got went way to his head and his contributions were far short of his ambitions. He alienated a lot of folks with his constant demands for what would otherwise be perks for senior engineers (or higher), and mid-day snowboarding excursion... and -to be brutally honest- preening when he visited HQ.

Last I heard he's settled down some and does good work back in his home territory in Georgia.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#52

Post by zeruch »

Zelphyr wrote: post #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.

You are correct.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#53

Post by zeruch »

ben1040 wrote: post #31

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.

VA as its initial raison d'etre went dead with the purging of the hardware division (disclosure, I am a biased bastard who worked at VA from 1998 - 2002 and have a deep romanticized attachment to the people and events of that period). Everything after was something pretending to it (or in the case of Sourceforge.net for several years, surviving as a remnant in an otherwise unrelated shell).

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#54

Post by zeruch »

I used to check FM every morning for years as part of my ritual to look for "neat stuff" to install and play around with on my various boxen. It was great while it lasted. I worked at VA and a common form of watercooler talk in the late 90s was akin to "hey, I found $APP and I think it might really let me do $USEFULTHING or at least be an interesting waste of time"

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#55

Post by bane »

Zelphyr wrote: post #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.

This is correct. TG basically carried the entire rest of the company for many years. Almost nothing else made enough money to support itself and the profits TG pulled in were enough to run the company for a long while. This was back when TG was still a pretty small outfit. As they've grown employee-wise, I'm sure more of the revenue has gone to sustaining this part of the business.

The basic problem is that so many of the other properties were virtually impossible to monetize and/or by the time attention got turned on them audience had moved elsewhere and the result was a mess.

It also didn't help that many of the senior people brought in to help turn the properties into money making operations really had never done business with this demographic.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#56

Post by Patrick_Devine »

ben1040 wrote: post #31

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.

This pains a lot of us who used to work at VA. It was a combination of the dot com bubble bursting and mismanagement which caused everything to implode. I remember saying at the time "if we can't make money during the largest economic upswing ever, when the hell are we going to make money?"

I think if we'd had any kind of fiscal responsibility we might have been able to survive the rocky years. At the time though, the idea was to ditch manufacturing and put everything behind SourceForge. In retrospect, that probably wasn't a horrible idea, except for that someone got the bright idea that the only way to for SourceForge to make money was to sell banner ads. I think GitHub proved that was a bad idea.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#58

Post by lusis »

js2 wrote: post #19
ebiester wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. I got in on the RHAT F&F deal thanks to some bug reports and a patch here and there.

I made the stupid mistake of allowing coworkers to buy some shares through me but I wasn't fully aware of the tax burden. Basically everything I made myself went in to paying the taxes on everyone else's shit. What little was left I had to give to my family to help with other bullshit.

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#59

Post by walterbell »

mtdewcmu wrote: post #41
wpietri wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mig…

How about https://www.ohloh.net ?

Re: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014

#60

Post by Patrick_Devine »

js2 wrote: post #19
ebiester wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I participated in both. The RHAT IPO was tricky because a lot of us were new to investing and there was a requirement to prove otherwise. This was regardless of whether you were willing to put up with the risk. Keep in mind that this was when online trading was in its relative infancy; there just wasn't the kind of access to information about trading that we enjoy these days.
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