13 ms·

Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014 (2014)

211 points by yankcrime 5y ago

kappuchino 5y ago
thanks for the nostalgia. freshmeat and slashdot are still in my muscle memory, i can type the adresses blindly. Still consuming slashdot, it has aged somehow better then digg or reddit (considering the atrocious layout vs. old.reddit.com)
- crb3 5y ago
  Old.reddit.com still works -- just use it. So far they're smart enough to realize that some folks like an information-dense display in their browser, rather than a fluffy echo of Yahoo's purple plague. I watch slashdot via http://alterslash.org http://alterslash.org, and occasionally (very occasionally) drop into the main site to add a comment. Are they still adding hot grits to Natalie Portman? Watching just the top comments on AlterSlash, I don't have to care.
johng 5y ago
I used to love browsing the site trying to find new stuff to try out on one of my Linux boxes. Good memories.
morelisp 5y ago
When people talk about "the old web" freshmeat (and its more visual equivalent, themes.org) is usually near the top of my mind. The ability to just see what everyone was up to without layers of product marketing (or, ugh, "DevRel") on top, and what random (real, not capitalism-induced) itches people were scratching was a creative rush. The closest thing to a programmer's equivalent of an art squat and junk shop. Its absence is also one of the reasons I think the Linux desktop got so insular in the past decade. Freshmeat was a water cooler for people working on small components - here's a text editor, here's an ebook reader, here's 50 music players - go build your own environment. Where do you go today to "shop" for free software? Usually, just your distro's package repo. The only comparable online experience I saw in the past decade was the high point of tumblr, albeit for a very different context.
guruz 5y ago
I didn't know it was gone. But seeing this makes me sentimental, I spent a lot of time there in my younger (and Linux) years. I'm a Mac user now.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  What made you switch? I started off with windows 98, was linux for most of my life but in the mean time had to use enough windows 2000, 7 and 10 to be dangerous. Got sent an M1 Mac Laptop for a contract last year, and didn't really get it. Now happily using a weird minimalist linux distro with a window manager.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pvg 5y ago
big thread at the time: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925135 - June 2014 (76 comments)
piokoch 5y ago
There were others too. I liked Tucows Downloads too, it started even earlier, in 1993.
- morelisp 5y ago
  Even by 1997, Tucows and the recent CNET Download.com were covered in crap. It's the same problem e.g. AlternativeTo has today. There's no sense of a human in the loop at any stage, even though back then there must have been. Tucows was where you went to find the printer driver you'd lost the original disks for, not (to pick an absolutely random freshmeat.net from page from 2002) "a fully-featured role playing suite of applications that allow people to meet and play a classic "pen-and-paper" game across the internet" or a tool "adding functionality and ease-of-use to RPM, by allowing a user to search through a collection of RPMs on various FTP servers (given in a configuration file), and download and install all in one action."
  - timbit42 5y ago
    Major Geeks replaced them for me.
    - morelisp 5y ago
      Well the first thing I see is two banner ads, one of them being a VPN. The next thing I see is three "system optimizers", two of which I know are garbage. I guess that's not too far from late Download.com energy, but I'd caution you about using it further.
- jcims 5y ago
  Trumpet Winsock days
- marcodiego 5y ago
  Freshmeat was FLOSS specific I think.
cedricbonhomme 5y ago
Freshmeat was really great. I was a consumer and producer of data. I remember well the announcement of the death of Freshmeat. This is partly why I did Freshermeat [1]. I am operating an instance dedicated to security projects [2] where you can submit projects. [1] https://github.com/cedricbonhomme/freshermeat https://github.com/cedricbonhomme/freshermeat [2] https://open-source-security-software.net https://open-source-security-software.net
- readingnews 5y ago
  Like yourself I was both a consumer and producer on Freshmeat. I recall when it closed, I think RMS or ESR (kinda fuzzy now) asked for people to help build a replacement. Personally, it is a real loss, not in a nostalgia sort of way, but in a discovery way. Search engines, searching github, heck just github, are no substitute for the cool software we found on Freshmeat. It was a way for projects to not only become visible, but for you to stumble upon them (as other comments have already noted). With some frequency, I wonder why no one has come up with a replacement. Sourceforge has had its ups and downs, but the front page of SourceForge compared to FreshMeat.net is like comparing a modern news conglomerate to Hacker News.
  - ms4720 5y ago
    I used to do the same thing using FreeBSD's ports collection back then. I amazed my coworkers with my skills at finding things.
- rkeene2 5y ago
  The instance I use is called freshcode [0] [0] https://freshcode.club/ https://freshcode.club/
bhaak 5y ago
1997? So I saw it for the first time when it was really fresh. I didn't know that.
bloopernova 5y ago
Freshmeat, Slashdot, Everything2, Advogato, and more. Relics from a time when the Internet felt like a wild frontier. The immense buzz when Mozilla open sourced Navigator/Firefox. The crazy first day of the IPO of VA Software (+698% above initial price!!!) Tweaking settings to get the best X11+Enlightenment speed possible, although I decided I preferred WindowMaker. Feeling like Open Source and Linux would take over the world (It did, really). Developers conferences at Apple to discuss this crazy upcoming Unix-based MacOS. (one of the presenters made a joke about how easy it would be to install apps, you'd just open a terminal and run "/bin/install --etc" and laughed at the horror on the faces of the assembled Mac evangelists) I feel like an old hippie, trying to tell people what Woodstock was like and why it was special, only to see their confusion and lack of really getting it. Not much of a point to this comment, just a big old nostalgia bomb early in my morning :)
- kalleboo 5y ago
  I spent the year coming up to the release of Mac OS X in flame wars adamant that Apple including Terminal.app in OS X would bring down the end of usability on the Mac, and it would bring an Era where all users would end up being forced to use it for certain tasks...
- bxjx 5y ago
  Great comment! This brought back so many similar memories - spending hours configuring Enlightenment and tweaking my desktop with transparency and flames (I hope Rasterman is still out there coding somewhere), everything2, audioscrobbler and last.fm. You're so right that the internet seemed so full of possibilities.
  - bloopernova 5y ago
    Was it Rasterman's Rxvt/Xterm .Xresources I used for his great colour scheme? I think so. I actually met my first wife through Everything2. At the risk of further exposing who I am, I even hosted the site at the University of Michigan Business School's little datacentre for a while. Good times!
  - mark_undoio 5y ago
cpach 5y ago
I really liked Freshmeat! These days, AlternativeTo is a pretty good… ehm, alternative. https://alternativeto.net/ https://alternativeto.net/
- beeforpork 5y ago
  Can I browse the stream of all update notifications? Can I establish filters to the full stream of changes? It was absolutely fantastic and addictive to do that in Freshmeat -- with so many projects to find and explore. And despite the volume, it could be filtered down to what could (barely) be consumed.
  - eps 5y ago
    That's more up Softpedia's alley.
zozbot234 5y ago
The AUR is probably the closest modern equivalent to Freshmeat. AIUI there are some projects trying yo bring something like that to other mainstream distros. Ubuntu-like distros have PPA's, while Debian calls these 'bikesheds'. But the idea is much the same.
the_lonely_road 5y ago
I am not familiar with this project but wonder if the timing of it (1997) and the name indicates it was a fan nod to Diablo? The first boss in that game is such a memorable tagline I can actually still hear it today burned into my brain somewhere. "Ahhh, fresh meat!"
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  Fresh meat is just a term for someone new. This reminds me of when I used the word "zealot" on a forum back in the same era and someone was adamant that it came from Starcraft and wondered why I was making a Starcraft reference when talking about zealotry.
  - jonathankoren 5y ago
    It’s amazing that first century Jews were playing StarCraft. That game is true classic.
  - yakireev 5y ago
    This happens a lot with folks who aren't native English speakers. It took me years to find out that "bash", "lisp", "git", "grub", etc are actual words. Also, "tinder" - how the are you supposed to know what that is if you're learning the language in XXI century? It took me way too long to realize that "tinder", "match" and the fire logo are a clever wordplay.
    - mkr-hn 5y ago
      Did you ever play a Sonic game? Miles "Tails" Prower's name is a play on Miles Per Hour. Even a lot of native English speakers in mile-using countries miss it. I try to take a Today's Lucky 10,000 approach to these situations.
    - kazinator 5y ago
      A few weeks ago, while driving, my eyes fixated on some Mitsubishi car's logo, and my mind wandered off: what is this "bishi"? That must just be rendaku from some "hishi"? Wait, I know what that is: hishi is water chestnut, which serves as a metaphor for the rhombus shape "hishigata" (like the word "diamond" does in English). So then it of course hit me: doh, three (mitsu) diamonds (hishi) in the logo.
DrBazza 5y ago
More nostalgia - reminds of sourceforge in particular and other 90-00s sites and products that were vacuumed up by various companies claiming to "add value" and then essentially destroying the thing. Anything bought by IBM or Embarcadero seems to end up being abandonware too. Not sure that's happening so much these days, but that's what happened to the 90/00s web.
interfixus 5y ago
That name! Associations ad libitum with meathooks and carcasses and bloodstained butchers. Yes, I actually believe this is the reason I never went there. And same goes, to a lesser extent, for Slashdot.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  The slash in Slashdot is just / as in /. —nothing violent!
  - antiframe 5y ago
    More cutely, the slash in Shashdot is so that when you verbally communicate the URL to someone, it sounds like "aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash dot dot oh are gee".
    - crb3 5y ago
      I've read that Malda wished a 'dot' TLD was available back then so it could be 'aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot dot'.
spacemanmatt 5y ago
Freshmeat.net expanded my view of F/OSS so much, at a time when I just didn't know the scope. Great site and great project.
degenerate 5y ago
Someone still runs https://freshcode.club https://freshcode.club but it appears to be mostly automated.
pelasaco 5y ago
I used to publish some OSS code at fm around 1997-2000. Some years later when I was learning rails, I remember to read a book written by the author of fm: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/1985 https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/1985 The rewrite of fm in rails was really good. I always used it as a reference for benchmarking when I was starting to work with RoR.
tluyben2 5y ago
Freshmeat and Slashdot were the sites then to predict stock prices; by the news that appeared, you could simply know the stocks would go up; anything with ‘Linux’ made companies skyrocket or crash. I was in NL so I got up, read the news, placed my orders based on the news, which was simply filtering the word Linux and see which companies were positively or negatively named, and that was it. I remember that VA and Borland/Inprise were just one big party. It was just printing money. This was why I cannot just hold stocks like investors say I should; trading made me a lot then as I was 100% it was going to crash. I am sure of this now again. But now I don’t have slashdot to predict both the up and down movements like clockwork.
blippage 5y ago
Just a few days back, when an greybeard I followed on Twitter announced that he set up a TikTok account for his investing blog, I came to this sudden realisation: everything has become Pinterest. I joked to him about how he was an e-boy now. By which I mean I've noticed that a large percentage of sites are converging to a a very similar aesthetic and demographic. Let me call this the "Zoomer Influencer Aesthetic". Lots of buttons all over the place, popups to subscribe, garbage at the top, etc. You have to sign into many of these sites, of course, because all about harvesting those eyeballs, baby. If you go back 10 years or so, it was a lot about content. You had something to say. Now it's a case that YOU are the content. It's all about you, how great your life is, how you're an "influencer", how you feel. When I first opened up TikTok, there was a category on unboxings, together with a bunch of beautiful boys and girls doing whatever vapid thing beautiful boys and girls do when they have nothing to teach or insights to impart. We should probably blame YouTube. Ryan Higa, James Jackson and Felix Kjellberg possibly ignited a match. The young ladies have jumped on board, too. I dare say that most of them are doing 10X better than most man could do. I do a bit of (mostly technical) blogging. I became fed up with Wordpress the other day, feeling it was too bloated. I had a hunt around for something that might be a suitable alternative. I had heard that Tumblr was picking up in popularity again, so I decided to give it a looksee to see if it was suitable. The answer was "no". Posts aren't dated (damn your teeth!), they seemed unsuitable for technical discussion, and they had that "Pinterest" feel to it. I quickly ruled it out. There were a few other sites I investigated, but figured they weren't all that great. Too much navigation and baloney. I'm looking for something simple. Anyway, that's all for now. Now get off my lawn!
- victorstanciu 5y ago
  > Too much navigation and baloney. I'm looking for something simple. Static site generator (I like Hugo) + Github. Use Github Actions to build it, and Github Pages to serve it. Cloudflare on top if you want a custom domain (for the auto SSL).
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > there was a category on unboxings Used to be, people could unpack shit by just removing it from its packaging without making a stupid fucking ceremony of it. The whole concept of "unboxing" -- the mere fact that such a "concept" exists[1] -- is a horrific example of how vapid the Internet has become. Yeah, hands off my Gran Torino, punks. ___ [1]: Or "is a thing", which used to be spelled "exists" back when a majority of people were literate.
abotsis 5y ago
freshmeat and slashdot are both still burned in my finger’s muscle memory when I’m at a url bar. Like typing ls at a shell prompt.
pabs3 5y ago
Where do people go now for the sort of info Freshmeat used to provide?
- jonathankoren 5y ago
  Does the need for that even exist today? It seems like everything has drifted to web and continuous deployment, the very concept of desktop applications and releases has disappeared.
  - pabs3 5y ago
    This is definitely not the case. At minimum there are web browser releases and OS related releases (distro releases, Linux kernel releases, glibc releases, bash releases etc). Then there are releases of each of the dependencies for web apps. There are releases for various desktops like GNOME/KDE and also apps like Krita/Inkscape/Blender.
    - jonathankoren 5y ago
      There is no end user that cares about some bug fix for a 50 year old shell.
      - pabs3 5y ago
        Only the original Unix shell is that old and isn't in use today. All the shells in use today are newer than that. They all definitely have bug fixes that people today care about though.
- timbit42 5y ago
  Major Geeks maybe.
- stevekemp 5y ago
  Not quite the same, but I follow a bunch of people on github, and see what they star/fork. That exposes me to new software.
- 5y ago
nobleach 5y ago
I literally have been there, done that, and bought the t-shirt. There used to be some great Linux t-shirts back in the day but, that bright orange Freshmeat shirt is one I wish I never tossed. I can't even find a pic on Google Images.
incanus77 5y ago
I checked Freshmeat for updates every day for a number of years, both to find out about interesting source updates to my favorite software, as well as to discover new software. I have strong memories of writing my first piece of fairly decently-used software (Ticketsmith) around 1999, then carefully hand-packaging the tarballs and crafting the FM entries. At one point, once I had learned a bit more about web servers, I moved the downloads from my web host to my own Linux-based Apache box running on a cable modem out of my apartment and watched the download logs with FM referrers in realtime. It was exhilarating. One thing I clearly remember about FM was a very nice color scheme and font choice. It had a certain polish to it in what was often a land of Apache auto-gen directory entries full of tarballs. Tangentially related: I worked briefly for VA Linux, as part of the first paid staff of Linux.com. I learned a lot of large-structure PHP site architecting that summer. My boss was OctoberX of Themes.org fame.
- IronWolve 5y ago
  I use to love browsing freshmeat and tucows for new applications, seeing new applications. Not new versions, actual new applications. Applications I didnt know about that came in real handy. New desktop apps, new linux x11 apps, etc. Was a great time. Closet thing I can think of today is alternative to, but thats just related apps, not new inventions.
smudgy 5y ago
Damn, this just kicked my nostalgia centers into high gear.
timbit42 5y ago
I miss Kuro5hin.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Years ago, before browsers could parse arbitrary XML, I wrote a tiny little XML parser in JavaScript. A naive, non-recursive parser that was quite fast (and had a weird renaissance in the era of Web Workers, ending up in WebEx and a couple of other packages for some reason). I started a Sourceforge and Freshmeat project and called it "XML for <SCRIPT>", out of amusement. And that is when I learned how many open source listings/aggregator projects did not escape their output. It was difficult even to get the name changed.
- samstave 5y ago
  OH man! I have a cringe-worthy XML story from ~1998. I was IT manager for a software fulfillment and manufacturing company in redwood city, ca. Our biggest client was SUN Microsystems. We manufactured the actual physical product for SUN OS Solaris, checkpoint FW, among things like games such as Everquest, TurboTax etc... If you bought any of these, we made the CDs, Boxes, Manuals, etc and handled drop-ship for orders done online via an EDI file that was FTP'd to our Linux FTP servers we built in house with the crew who would later found LinuxCare. So, SUN wanted to have a big meeting on changing the EDI process from the FTP PUT of a flat text-file that we then needed to parse (which was a pain as our devs were constantly fiddling bits in order to make the EDI flatfile import into our manifest system on AS/400 went cleanly. SUN wanted us to adopt this new EDI process based on their newly adopted plan for XML... I think this may have actually been the first meeting SUN had with any vendor to start XML adoption. We didnt have any experience, clearly with XML, and SUN was doing a poor job in this meeting explaining why they wanted to use it. I was ~22 years old or so, and I said the following cringe-worthy comment to the head of the relationship with SUN in front of the entire exec staff at my company: SUN: So we want to eliminate the flat-file EDI format we have because of all our data issues (many late night hours each week fixing batch jobs on the AS/400 by many people on my team) ME: "So, just so I understand, we are going to drop the crappy way your sending us data, and you want us to adopt this new thing, XML, which we haven't used yet - and you think this will resolve the data issues we have with the EDI process?" ENTIRE C-SUITE AT MY COMPANY: *WAVING ARMS WILDLY* trying to get me to STFU mid sentence for calling SUN's EDI processes "CRAPPY" I'll never forget that meeting. I Still cringe over that meeting to this day, however in a cmical way - as I realize I was 22 years old and that meeting was the first (many) had ever heard of XML. --- Fun Fact; the folks that setup our FTP EDI process with linux, cronjobs for import and supporting our Linux boxes were Dave Sifry, Chris DiBonna and the others that founded LinuxCare. Fun other fact ; After having these consultants for some time, I went to Dave Sifry, and I said to him "If I were you, I would start a company that specifically offers linux support contracts. A ~month later Dave Sifry sat me down and said "Guess what I am doing!? We created a company called LinuxCare!" We spoke briefly about me joining them, but I wasn't a good fit for helping them at this point... just a good catalyst that solidified what they were already thinking about.
bcrescimanno 5y ago
I loved Freshmeat from about 1998 to maybe 2002 or so and I remember checking it multiple times a day from my first dorm room at Georgia Tech. In those days, the "./configure && make && make install" was burned into my mind. As others have said, it really felt like the "wild west." I remember needing to turn in a printed paper and looking frantically for an updated version of AbiWord that fixed a bug I was experiencing. By the end of my time using it, it already felt superfluous. I moved from RedHat to Debian and apt was clearly a better system for managing the software on my system than the random mix of installing RPMs and grabbing source tarballs.
jmclnx 5y ago
I use to use Freshmeat all the time in the 90s and early 2000s. I think it came back but was renamed due to its name not being "good". I miss those early Linux Days, lots was happening. Now, with corporations controlling the kernel, Linux is rather boring.
- vidarh 5y ago
  It was renamed to Freecode, you're right (EDIT: indeed I found I complained about the renaming being a sign it was all over in the HN thread about Freshmeat closing back in 2014...)
booleanbetrayal 5y ago
I did one of the first banners (crowdsurfing logo) for Freshmeat back when keeping up with dependency management was exciting.
- booleanbetrayal 5y ago
  lol ... found it @ http://web.archive.org/web/19980419152907/http://freshmeat.unreal.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/19980419152907/http://freshmeat.u... What a nostalgia trigger. This was from back when Freshmeat was on unreal.org!
thwarted 5y ago
Anyone have a copy of the really early freshmeat header image/logo that was a closeup of a tattoo being applied to someone's back, but mildly obscured because it was keyholed through the text? It was during a period where freshmeat had a dark/black background/theme. Due to redirects, it seems like archive.org doesn't have it.
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  Yeah, that header... in between that and the domain name, I am sure I am not alone in having to explain to an overly officious boss/security department that it was all kosher.
blablabla123 5y ago
I love how they still have the categories for software from Planning/Pre-Alpha to Mature. At some point I got almost all Desktop apps from there
asteroidp 5y ago
Once sf.net became a super obnoxious piece with shady ads. It was an incredibly fast exodus.
justinator 5y ago
The amount of traffic my little Perl app got from Freshmeat was astounding. Paid my way through college.
vidarh 5y ago
There's an instance still running, but frozen in time at the 2014 state here: http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/ http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/ "Content may be stale" indeed (from the header)...
stonogo 5y ago
One of the huge advantages Freshmeat had was the Software Trove categorization feature. You could filter software to very specific requirements and find exactly the tools that fit your needs. During one of the needless web 2.0 rewrites which arose as part of the deck-chair rearranging near the end of the site, they got rid of that entirely and transitioned to a free-form tagging interface, which was comparatively useless. It was a real step backwards in data grooming and stripped the site of much of its value. Unfortunately the freecode.club replacement service adopted the tagging mechanism instead of the Trove system.
neilv 5y ago
I still have a reminder of relying on Freshmeat, in a 1999 Web page at the MIT Media Lab: > Probably the best directory of Linux software right now is Freshmeat (http://www.freshmeat.net/ http://www.freshmeat.net/). You can use the full-text search or the category-based browsing (labeled "appindex"). Note that the category scheme is kinda odd. I also pointed people at `rpmfind.net`. I'd find those random packages scary today (like I do xda-developers), but it was a more innocent time. https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/
GaelFG 5y ago
I can't understand the sentence : "Each night, a different company would try to outdo the others with a lavish party designed for frat boys that would fall feebly at the feet of a Dungeons & Dragons crowd." can someone explain it ? What is the implied link between big parties and 'Dungeons & Dragons crowd' ?
- CRConrad 5y ago
  At a guess, the intended contrast is not to do with big parties per se, but that between a "party designed for frat boys" and a "Dungeons & Dragons crowd".
schemathings 5y ago
I gave a talk on the use of freeware for non-profits - I titled it tongue in cheek Freshmeat for Vegetarians.
jakupovic 5y ago
I remember visiting freshman daily looking for new apps to install on my RH 5.2 box. This is how I learned about apache, mysql and everything else on between. Still remember fondly my early days.

211 points by yankcrime 5y ago

thanks for the nostalgia. freshmeat and slashdot are still in my muscle memory, i can type the adresses blindly. Still consuming slashdot, it has aged somehow better then digg or reddit (considering the atrocious layout vs. old.reddit.com)

crb3 5y ago
Old.reddit.com still works -- just use it. So far they're smart enough to realize that some folks like an information-dense display in their browser, rather than a fluffy echo of Yahoo's purple plague. I watch slashdot via http://alterslash.org http://alterslash.org, and occasionally (very occasionally) drop into the main site to add a comment. Are they still adding hot grits to Natalie Portman? Watching just the top comments on AlterSlash, I don't have to care.

johng 5y ago

I used to love browsing the site trying to find new stuff to try out on one of my Linux boxes. Good memories.

morelisp 5y ago

When people talk about "the old web" freshmeat (and its more visual equivalent, themes.org) is usually near the top of my mind. The ability to just see what everyone was up to without layers of product marketing (or, ugh, "DevRel") on top, and what random (real, not capitalism-induced) itches people were scratching was a creative rush. The closest thing to a programmer's equivalent of an art squat and junk shop. Its absence is also one of the reasons I think the Linux desktop got so insular in the past decade. Freshmeat was a water cooler for people working on small components - here's a text editor, here's an ebook reader, here's 50 music players - go build your own environment. Where do you go today to "shop" for free software? Usually, just your distro's package repo. The only comparable online experience I saw in the past decade was the high point of tumblr, albeit for a very different context.

guruz 5y ago

I didn't know it was gone. But seeing this makes me sentimental, I spent a lot of time there in my younger (and Linux) years. I'm a Mac user now.

LAC-Tech 5y ago
What made you switch? I started off with windows 98, was linux for most of my life but in the mean time had to use enough windows 2000, 7 and 10 to be dangerous. Got sent an M1 Mac Laptop for a contract last year, and didn't really get it. Now happily using a weird minimalist linux distro with a window manager.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pvg 5y ago

big thread at the time: Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925135 - June 2014 (76 comments)

piokoch 5y ago

There were others too. I liked Tucows Downloads too, it started even earlier, in 1993.

morelisp 5y ago
Even by 1997, Tucows and the recent CNET Download.com were covered in crap. It's the same problem e.g. AlternativeTo has today. There's no sense of a human in the loop at any stage, even though back then there must have been. Tucows was where you went to find the printer driver you'd lost the original disks for, not (to pick an absolutely random freshmeat.net from page from 2002) "a fully-featured role playing suite of applications that allow people to meet and play a classic "pen-and-paper" game across the internet" or a tool "adding functionality and ease-of-use to RPM, by allowing a user to search through a collection of RPMs on various FTP servers (given in a configuration file), and download and install all in one action."
- timbit42 5y ago
  Major Geeks replaced them for me.
  - morelisp 5y ago
    Well the first thing I see is two banner ads, one of them being a VPN. The next thing I see is three "system optimizers", two of which I know are garbage. I guess that's not too far from late Download.com energy, but I'd caution you about using it further.
jcims 5y ago
Trumpet Winsock days
marcodiego 5y ago
Freshmeat was FLOSS specific I think.

cedricbonhomme 5y ago

Freshmeat was really great. I was a consumer and producer of data. I remember well the announcement of the death of Freshmeat. This is partly why I did Freshermeat [1]. I am operating an instance dedicated to security projects [2] where you can submit projects. [1] https://github.com/cedricbonhomme/freshermeat https://github.com/cedricbonhomme/freshermeat [2] https://open-source-security-software.net https://open-source-security-software.net

readingnews 5y ago
Like yourself I was both a consumer and producer on Freshmeat. I recall when it closed, I think RMS or ESR (kinda fuzzy now) asked for people to help build a replacement. Personally, it is a real loss, not in a nostalgia sort of way, but in a discovery way. Search engines, searching github, heck just github, are no substitute for the cool software we found on Freshmeat. It was a way for projects to not only become visible, but for you to stumble upon them (as other comments have already noted). With some frequency, I wonder why no one has come up with a replacement. Sourceforge has had its ups and downs, but the front page of SourceForge compared to FreshMeat.net is like comparing a modern news conglomerate to Hacker News.
- ms4720 5y ago
  I used to do the same thing using FreeBSD's ports collection back then. I amazed my coworkers with my skills at finding things.
rkeene2 5y ago
The instance I use is called freshcode [0] [0] https://freshcode.club/ https://freshcode.club/

bhaak 5y ago

1997? So I saw it for the first time when it was really fresh. I didn't know that.

bloopernova 5y ago

Freshmeat, Slashdot, Everything2, Advogato, and more. Relics from a time when the Internet felt like a wild frontier. The immense buzz when Mozilla open sourced Navigator/Firefox. The crazy first day of the IPO of VA Software (+698% above initial price!!!) Tweaking settings to get the best X11+Enlightenment speed possible, although I decided I preferred WindowMaker. Feeling like Open Source and Linux would take over the world (It did, really). Developers conferences at Apple to discuss this crazy upcoming Unix-based MacOS. (one of the presenters made a joke about how easy it would be to install apps, you'd just open a terminal and run "/bin/install --etc" and laughed at the horror on the faces of the assembled Mac evangelists) I feel like an old hippie, trying to tell people what Woodstock was like and why it was special, only to see their confusion and lack of really getting it. Not much of a point to this comment, just a big old nostalgia bomb early in my morning :)

kalleboo 5y ago
I spent the year coming up to the release of Mac OS X in flame wars adamant that Apple including Terminal.app in OS X would bring down the end of usability on the Mac, and it would bring an Era where all users would end up being forced to use it for certain tasks...
bxjx 5y ago
Great comment! This brought back so many similar memories - spending hours configuring Enlightenment and tweaking my desktop with transparency and flames (I hope Rasterman is still out there coding somewhere), everything2, audioscrobbler and last.fm. You're so right that the internet seemed so full of possibilities.
- bloopernova 5y ago
  Was it Rasterman's Rxvt/Xterm .Xresources I used for his great colour scheme? I think so. I actually met my first wife through Everything2. At the risk of further exposing who I am, I even hosted the site at the University of Michigan Business School's little datacentre for a while. Good times!
- mark_undoio 5y ago

cpach 5y ago

I really liked Freshmeat! These days, AlternativeTo is a pretty good… ehm, alternative. https://alternativeto.net/ https://alternativeto.net/

beeforpork 5y ago
Can I browse the stream of all update notifications? Can I establish filters to the full stream of changes? It was absolutely fantastic and addictive to do that in Freshmeat -- with so many projects to find and explore. And despite the volume, it could be filtered down to what could (barely) be consumed.
- eps 5y ago
  That's more up Softpedia's alley.

zozbot234 5y ago

The AUR is probably the closest modern equivalent to Freshmeat. AIUI there are some projects trying yo bring something like that to other mainstream distros. Ubuntu-like distros have PPA's, while Debian calls these 'bikesheds'. But the idea is much the same.

the_lonely_road 5y ago

I am not familiar with this project but wonder if the timing of it (1997) and the name indicates it was a fan nod to Diablo? The first boss in that game is such a memorable tagline I can actually still hear it today burned into my brain somewhere. "Ahhh, fresh meat!"

mkr-hn 5y ago
Fresh meat is just a term for someone new. This reminds me of when I used the word "zealot" on a forum back in the same era and someone was adamant that it came from Starcraft and wondered why I was making a Starcraft reference when talking about zealotry.
- jonathankoren 5y ago
  It’s amazing that first century Jews were playing StarCraft. That game is true classic.
- yakireev 5y ago
  This happens a lot with folks who aren't native English speakers. It took me years to find out that "bash", "lisp", "git", "grub", etc are actual words. Also, "tinder" - how the are you supposed to know what that is if you're learning the language in XXI century? It took me way too long to realize that "tinder", "match" and the fire logo are a clever wordplay.
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    Did you ever play a Sonic game? Miles "Tails" Prower's name is a play on Miles Per Hour. Even a lot of native English speakers in mile-using countries miss it. I try to take a Today's Lucky 10,000 approach to these situations.
  - kazinator 5y ago
    A few weeks ago, while driving, my eyes fixated on some Mitsubishi car's logo, and my mind wandered off: what is this "bishi"? That must just be rendaku from some "hishi"? Wait, I know what that is: hishi is water chestnut, which serves as a metaphor for the rhombus shape "hishigata" (like the word "diamond" does in English). So then it of course hit me: doh, three (mitsu) diamonds (hishi) in the logo.

DrBazza 5y ago

More nostalgia - reminds of sourceforge in particular and other 90-00s sites and products that were vacuumed up by various companies claiming to "add value" and then essentially destroying the thing. Anything bought by IBM or Embarcadero seems to end up being abandonware too. Not sure that's happening so much these days, but that's what happened to the 90/00s web.

interfixus 5y ago

That name! Associations ad libitum with meathooks and carcasses and bloodstained butchers. Yes, I actually believe this is the reason I never went there. And same goes, to a lesser extent, for Slashdot.

JadeNB 5y ago
The slash in Slashdot is just / as in /. —nothing violent!
- antiframe 5y ago
  More cutely, the slash in Shashdot is so that when you verbally communicate the URL to someone, it sounds like "aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash dot dot oh are gee".
  - crb3 5y ago
    I've read that Malda wished a 'dot' TLD was available back then so it could be 'aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot dot'.

spacemanmatt 5y ago

Freshmeat.net expanded my view of F/OSS so much, at a time when I just didn't know the scope. Great site and great project.

degenerate 5y ago

Someone still runs https://freshcode.club https://freshcode.club but it appears to be mostly automated.

pelasaco 5y ago

I used to publish some OSS code at fm around 1997-2000. Some years later when I was learning rails, I remember to read a book written by the author of fm: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/1985 https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/1985 The rewrite of fm in rails was really good. I always used it as a reference for benchmarking when I was starting to work with RoR.

tluyben2 5y ago

Freshmeat and Slashdot were the sites then to predict stock prices; by the news that appeared, you could simply know the stocks would go up; anything with ‘Linux’ made companies skyrocket or crash. I was in NL so I got up, read the news, placed my orders based on the news, which was simply filtering the word Linux and see which companies were positively or negatively named, and that was it. I remember that VA and Borland/Inprise were just one big party. It was just printing money. This was why I cannot just hold stocks like investors say I should; trading made me a lot then as I was 100% it was going to crash. I am sure of this now again. But now I don’t have slashdot to predict both the up and down movements like clockwork.

blippage 5y ago

Just a few days back, when an greybeard I followed on Twitter announced that he set up a TikTok account for his investing blog, I came to this sudden realisation: everything has become Pinterest. I joked to him about how he was an e-boy now. By which I mean I've noticed that a large percentage of sites are converging to a a very similar aesthetic and demographic. Let me call this the "Zoomer Influencer Aesthetic". Lots of buttons all over the place, popups to subscribe, garbage at the top, etc. You have to sign into many of these sites, of course, because all about harvesting those eyeballs, baby. If you go back 10 years or so, it was a lot about content. You had something to say. Now it's a case that YOU are the content. It's all about you, how great your life is, how you're an "influencer", how you feel. When I first opened up TikTok, there was a category on unboxings, together with a bunch of beautiful boys and girls doing whatever vapid thing beautiful boys and girls do when they have nothing to teach or insights to impart. We should probably blame YouTube. Ryan Higa, James Jackson and Felix Kjellberg possibly ignited a match. The young ladies have jumped on board, too. I dare say that most of them are doing 10X better than most man could do. I do a bit of (mostly technical) blogging. I became fed up with Wordpress the other day, feeling it was too bloated. I had a hunt around for something that might be a suitable alternative. I had heard that Tumblr was picking up in popularity again, so I decided to give it a looksee to see if it was suitable. The answer was "no". Posts aren't dated (damn your teeth!), they seemed unsuitable for technical discussion, and they had that "Pinterest" feel to it. I quickly ruled it out. There were a few other sites I investigated, but figured they weren't all that great. Too much navigation and baloney. I'm looking for something simple. Anyway, that's all for now. Now get off my lawn!

victorstanciu 5y ago
> Too much navigation and baloney. I'm looking for something simple. Static site generator (I like Hugo) + Github. Use Github Actions to build it, and Github Pages to serve it. Cloudflare on top if you want a custom domain (for the auto SSL).
CRConrad 5y ago
> there was a category on unboxings Used to be, people could unpack shit by just removing it from its packaging without making a stupid fucking ceremony of it. The whole concept of "unboxing" -- the mere fact that such a "concept" exists[1] -- is a horrific example of how vapid the Internet has become. Yeah, hands off my Gran Torino, punks. ___ [1]: Or "is a thing", which used to be spelled "exists" back when a majority of people were literate.

abotsis 5y ago

freshmeat and slashdot are both still burned in my finger’s muscle memory when I’m at a url bar. Like typing ls at a shell prompt.

pabs3 5y ago

Where do people go now for the sort of info Freshmeat used to provide?

jonathankoren 5y ago
Does the need for that even exist today? It seems like everything has drifted to web and continuous deployment, the very concept of desktop applications and releases has disappeared.
- pabs3 5y ago
  This is definitely not the case. At minimum there are web browser releases and OS related releases (distro releases, Linux kernel releases, glibc releases, bash releases etc). Then there are releases of each of the dependencies for web apps. There are releases for various desktops like GNOME/KDE and also apps like Krita/Inkscape/Blender.
  - jonathankoren 5y ago
    There is no end user that cares about some bug fix for a 50 year old shell.
    - pabs3 5y ago
      Only the original Unix shell is that old and isn't in use today. All the shells in use today are newer than that. They all definitely have bug fixes that people today care about though.
timbit42 5y ago
Major Geeks maybe.
stevekemp 5y ago
Not quite the same, but I follow a bunch of people on github, and see what they star/fork. That exposes me to new software.
5y ago

nobleach 5y ago

I literally have been there, done that, and bought the t-shirt. There used to be some great Linux t-shirts back in the day but, that bright orange Freshmeat shirt is one I wish I never tossed. I can't even find a pic on Google Images.

incanus77 5y ago

I checked Freshmeat for updates every day for a number of years, both to find out about interesting source updates to my favorite software, as well as to discover new software. I have strong memories of writing my first piece of fairly decently-used software (Ticketsmith) around 1999, then carefully hand-packaging the tarballs and crafting the FM entries. At one point, once I had learned a bit more about web servers, I moved the downloads from my web host to my own Linux-based Apache box running on a cable modem out of my apartment and watched the download logs with FM referrers in realtime. It was exhilarating. One thing I clearly remember about FM was a very nice color scheme and font choice. It had a certain polish to it in what was often a land of Apache auto-gen directory entries full of tarballs. Tangentially related: I worked briefly for VA Linux, as part of the first paid staff of Linux.com. I learned a lot of large-structure PHP site architecting that summer. My boss was OctoberX of Themes.org fame.

IronWolve 5y ago
I use to love browsing freshmeat and tucows for new applications, seeing new applications. Not new versions, actual new applications. Applications I didnt know about that came in real handy. New desktop apps, new linux x11 apps, etc. Was a great time. Closet thing I can think of today is alternative to, but thats just related apps, not new inventions.

smudgy 5y ago

Damn, this just kicked my nostalgia centers into high gear.

timbit42 5y ago

I miss Kuro5hin.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

Years ago, before browsers could parse arbitrary XML, I wrote a tiny little XML parser in JavaScript. A naive, non-recursive parser that was quite fast (and had a weird renaissance in the era of Web Workers, ending up in WebEx and a couple of other packages for some reason). I started a Sourceforge and Freshmeat project and called it "XML for <SCRIPT>", out of amusement. And that is when I learned how many open source listings/aggregator projects did not escape their output. It was difficult even to get the name changed.

samstave 5y ago
OH man! I have a cringe-worthy XML story from ~1998. I was IT manager for a software fulfillment and manufacturing company in redwood city, ca. Our biggest client was SUN Microsystems. We manufactured the actual physical product for SUN OS Solaris, checkpoint FW, among things like games such as Everquest, TurboTax etc... If you bought any of these, we made the CDs, Boxes, Manuals, etc and handled drop-ship for orders done online via an EDI file that was FTP'd to our Linux FTP servers we built in house with the crew who would later found LinuxCare. So, SUN wanted to have a big meeting on changing the EDI process from the FTP PUT of a flat text-file that we then needed to parse (which was a pain as our devs were constantly fiddling bits in order to make the EDI flatfile import into our manifest system on AS/400 went cleanly. SUN wanted us to adopt this new EDI process based on their newly adopted plan for XML... I think this may have actually been the first meeting SUN had with any vendor to start XML adoption. We didnt have any experience, clearly with XML, and SUN was doing a poor job in this meeting explaining why they wanted to use it. I was ~22 years old or so, and I said the following cringe-worthy comment to the head of the relationship with SUN in front of the entire exec staff at my company: SUN: So we want to eliminate the flat-file EDI format we have because of all our data issues (many late night hours each week fixing batch jobs on the AS/400 by many people on my team) ME: "So, just so I understand, we are going to drop the crappy way your sending us data, and you want us to adopt this new thing, XML, which we haven't used yet - and you think this will resolve the data issues we have with the EDI process?" ENTIRE C-SUITE AT MY COMPANY: *WAVING ARMS WILDLY* trying to get me to STFU mid sentence for calling SUN's EDI processes "CRAPPY" I'll never forget that meeting. I Still cringe over that meeting to this day, however in a cmical way - as I realize I was 22 years old and that meeting was the first (many) had ever heard of XML. --- Fun Fact; the folks that setup our FTP EDI process with linux, cronjobs for import and supporting our Linux boxes were Dave Sifry, Chris DiBonna and the others that founded LinuxCare. Fun other fact ; After having these consultants for some time, I went to Dave Sifry, and I said to him "If I were you, I would start a company that specifically offers linux support contracts. A ~month later Dave Sifry sat me down and said "Guess what I am doing!? We created a company called LinuxCare!" We spoke briefly about me joining them, but I wasn't a good fit for helping them at this point... just a good catalyst that solidified what they were already thinking about.

bcrescimanno 5y ago

I loved Freshmeat from about 1998 to maybe 2002 or so and I remember checking it multiple times a day from my first dorm room at Georgia Tech. In those days, the "./configure && make && make install" was burned into my mind. As others have said, it really felt like the "wild west." I remember needing to turn in a printed paper and looking frantically for an updated version of AbiWord that fixed a bug I was experiencing. By the end of my time using it, it already felt superfluous. I moved from RedHat to Debian and apt was clearly a better system for managing the software on my system than the random mix of installing RPMs and grabbing source tarballs.

jmclnx 5y ago

I use to use Freshmeat all the time in the 90s and early 2000s. I think it came back but was renamed due to its name not being "good". I miss those early Linux Days, lots was happening. Now, with corporations controlling the kernel, Linux is rather boring.

vidarh 5y ago
It was renamed to Freecode, you're right (EDIT: indeed I found I complained about the renaming being a sign it was all over in the HN thread about Freshmeat closing back in 2014...)

booleanbetrayal 5y ago

I did one of the first banners (crowdsurfing logo) for Freshmeat back when keeping up with dependency management was exciting.

booleanbetrayal 5y ago
lol ... found it @ http://web.archive.org/web/19980419152907/http://freshmeat.unreal.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/19980419152907/http://freshmeat.u... What a nostalgia trigger. This was from back when Freshmeat was on unreal.org!

thwarted 5y ago

Anyone have a copy of the really early freshmeat header image/logo that was a closeup of a tattoo being applied to someone's back, but mildly obscured because it was keyholed through the text? It was during a period where freshmeat had a dark/black background/theme. Due to redirects, it seems like archive.org doesn't have it.

FireBeyond 5y ago
Yeah, that header... in between that and the domain name, I am sure I am not alone in having to explain to an overly officious boss/security department that it was all kosher.

blablabla123 5y ago

I love how they still have the categories for software from Planning/Pre-Alpha to Mature. At some point I got almost all Desktop apps from there

asteroidp 5y ago

Once sf.net became a super obnoxious piece with shady ads. It was an incredibly fast exodus.

justinator 5y ago

The amount of traffic my little Perl app got from Freshmeat was astounding. Paid my way through college.

vidarh 5y ago

There's an instance still running, but frozen in time at the 2014 state here: http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/ http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/ "Content may be stale" indeed (from the header)...

stonogo 5y ago

One of the huge advantages Freshmeat had was the Software Trove categorization feature. You could filter software to very specific requirements and find exactly the tools that fit your needs. During one of the needless web 2.0 rewrites which arose as part of the deck-chair rearranging near the end of the site, they got rid of that entirely and transitioned to a free-form tagging interface, which was comparatively useless. It was a real step backwards in data grooming and stripped the site of much of its value. Unfortunately the freecode.club replacement service adopted the tagging mechanism instead of the Trove system.

neilv 5y ago

I still have a reminder of relying on Freshmeat, in a 1999 Web page at the MIT Media Lab: > Probably the best directory of Linux software right now is Freshmeat (http://www.freshmeat.net/ http://www.freshmeat.net/). You can use the full-text search or the category-based browsing (labeled "appindex"). Note that the category scheme is kinda odd. I also pointed people at `rpmfind.net`. I'd find those random packages scary today (like I do xda-developers), but it was a more innocent time. https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/

GaelFG 5y ago

I can't understand the sentence : "Each night, a different company would try to outdo the others with a lavish party designed for frat boys that would fall feebly at the feet of a Dungeons & Dragons crowd." can someone explain it ? What is the implied link between big parties and 'Dungeons & Dragons crowd' ?

CRConrad 5y ago
At a guess, the intended contrast is not to do with big parties per se, but that between a "party designed for frat boys" and a "Dungeons & Dragons crowd".

schemathings 5y ago

I gave a talk on the use of freeware for non-profits - I titled it tongue in cheek Freshmeat for Vegetarians.

jakupovic 5y ago

I remember visiting freshman daily looking for new apps to install on my RH 5.2 box. This is how I learned about apache, mysql and everything else on between. Still remember fondly my early days.