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Freecode Freezeup
LeadSongDog (1120683) writes The venerable Freecode site has today gone static, blaming low traffic. No new content is being accepted, but they continue to serve existing content. They recommend projects consider moving to Sourceforge.
Probably obvious, but Freecode/SourceForge/Slashdot share a corporate parent.
it's called github.com.
If it is static, it probably doesn't cost that much for them to run it. Just shove it in a tiny corner of your web space, pay for the domain name every few years. Perhaps someone will buy it from them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
they should have never changed the name.
Dice killed it, just like they killed Sourceforge and are killing Slashdot.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
github.com is great and all, but it doesn't contain all free or open source software that's out there, by a long stretch.
Where is the alternative meta-level listing?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
How will visiting sourceforge help me see summaries of new software releases? Guess I'm confused. I always thought freshmeat.net (renaming and moving it to freecode.com was stupid IMO) was just a listing site, and that's what I've used it for the last 14 years. And it's still been useful at that. Takes money to pay the bills, but it seems to me that this is another example of Dice thinking they can takes something that's popular and monetize it without bothering to find out why it's popular, and what value it gave to the community.
Sad, though, I remember when I used to hit freshmeat.net as much as slashdot.
I am glad, though, that I got a good chunk of my life back when I learned to just rely on aptitude to keep stuff on my system updated for me.
Still, I ought to go and compile a kernel for the heck of it though, for old time's sake.
I regularly visit Freecode to see the new open source projects and discover updates to the projects that I'm already using. I've built up quite a library of projects that I follow on Freecode. Now it seems that they've disabled logins, so there doesn't appear to be a way to at least write down the information on all of the projects that I have followed in the past. Any chance that they'll at least temporarily enable logins again, in order to "export" followed projects, or are we just hosed?
That used to be REALLY valuable, in the old days - which we then considered new-school. You know! The years of "Cathedral and Bazaar" and "Cluetrain"...
Now? I really won't bother building Windowmaker applets or LibSpinyEchidna.so from source. :-)
Do you want some schadenfreude? Re-read "Cluetrain Manifesto" while thinking of Facebook and AWS.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
They should have tried a new Beta format. Surely that would have saved them.
This is sad for me since I've been browsing the release lists there for years. From time to time I'd take a look in there and sometimes would find interesting projects that I wouldn't have found other way.
Are there any comparable websites? (Listing releases of open source projects)
Isn't Freecode just a clone of Soureforge? A place to download free crap? What problem did it solve?
No. It was basically just metadata. Hosted files, official project page, bug tracker, version control, etc... that was all off site at any configurable location the project wanted.
"Freecode" was an awful name. Freshmeat.net, while not obvious, didn't make it sound like it hosted code.
AFAIK, there is no replacement for it. Perhaps someone can fork it, but the data is the really valuable part.
Rather than change the name and update the site layout (which, IMO, is now worse than it was), they should have enhanced the actual code so that it had closer integration with popular code repositories (sourceforge included). When one added a project to freshmeat/freecode, you had to fill out ever link (where your site it, where version control is, where each version download is, etc etc). They could have had a "project type" dropdown, then you fill in where your github project, or sourceforge project, etc lives, and it'd auto-fill the rest and keep the release versions up to date automatically. As it is/was, with every release you made, you had to go and manually update freshmeat/freecode (unless you used some third party tool to have it do that for you).
Anyway... I'll miss it.
Freshmeat was handy, but not the end-all be-all. Some of the formerly niche projects already emrged under a larger organization, such as GNU, Apache, Mozilla, or Google.
Try http://www.ohloh.net/ instead.
Come on, this is dice! You're just hosed. You can always email their support, I'm sure they can send you some marketing-speak like they did to me, promising they really care about us while still maintaining the policy of hosing us.
What, you were personally invested in your personal preferences and histories and usage data?! Dice thought you were creating that data just to make them money. They have no moral or ethical concept to indicate that you would actually own the data you created.
It was a meta-listing for projects that were hosted elsewhere. So you could look at a combined listing, and search based on keywords instead of based on hosting provider.
Honestly, hosting provider has nothing to do with what users would be interested in software for. "freecode" (aka freshmeat.net) was the only place with good combined listings. Now, there is no such place.
OK, so Freshmeat... er Freecode was a site with an up-to-the-minute listing of the latest source updates. It's value was in the freshness. And the site is going static.... *boggle*... what part of this am I not getting? A static version of Freecode is a waste of a good IPV4 address.
Rather than change the name and update the site layout (which, IMO, is now worse than it was)
Freecode was Alpha...and you guys thought Beta was bad!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Sad to see it go, it's been a staple for me, for many years.
I don't see much value in a static version of Freecode - I mean, it has reference value, but why bother? I still see the function itself as a valuable resource; I don't particularly care for sourceforge.net or its layout. How about they open source the Freecode code, so that someone else can consider using it.
So you've managed to kill off Freshmeat (first with a stupidly unnecessary name-change, then allowing crappy "Download Button" ads on a download site, now by removing it's only purpose).
What the hell do you have planned for Slashdot next?
How about, rather than destroying these venerable brands, you actually try and USE THEM rather than let them slide into obscurity?
Freshmeat / Freecode wasn't about downloads, it was about release announcements and new project announcements.
I still have a slashbox configured, which I've used a few times in the past several months to learn about new projects that I'd otherwise have never learned about.
I wrote and maintain an open-source library whose primary purpose is to support the software that I write for my employer. Because of that, I need to keep the primary copy of the library's source code in my employer's SVN server.
However, I also like to keep the library's source available for public use (BSD licensed, with my employer's permission). Traditionally I've been doing that by creating a .zip file containing the source code of each new release, uploading that .zip file to my public web server, and posting a release announcement on Freecode.com.
If Freecode.com can no longer play that announcement/indexing role for future releases, where should I post release notices to instead? It seems like github.com and sourceforge.net assume that all source code will be hosted by their own source-code-management servers, which isn't a good option for me. Just posting them to my own little web page seems insufficient.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
what part of this am I not getting?
It's a sign of the times.
Most people just do a "sudo apt-get install" now or click on "Install" in the update manager.
FOSS is mature in that it has a boring, straight-laced, conformist main-stream that caters to 99.9% of the public's needs with unsurprising conventional applications.
We have become institutionalised and the cutting edge has been blunted.
Stick Men
I still have a slashbox configured, which I've used a few times in the past several months to learn about new projects that I'd otherwise have never learned about.
Just out of curiosity, how did you manage to keep that one alive so long?
I too kept re-adding that slashbox and dice kept removing it for the past couple months. /. stories.
I finally decided last week to stop fighting it and just use my bookmark instead of first visiting slashdot and then hitting the freecode slashbox title once I reached the end of the
I really hope Dice wasn't counting freecode visitors based on how many people fought with them over removing that box, and I was the deciding counter :P
For over 10 years I've always dedicated at Least 15 minutes of each day for going down the new updates on freecode / freshmeat.
In fact there was 3 pages worth of updates posted between this morning when I last checked and Monday evening the time I checked before last.
That almost seems like more projects listed than slashdot lists articles in the same time frame :P
Thinking back, I've actually checked freecode nearly daily (at least during the week, though I did this weekend too) all the way back to a short hospital stay I had about 4 weeks back when I was offline completely for a few days.
There was literally not a single day that went by without at least a full page of freecode updates posted.
And while I can't really be sure, it sure feels to me like the number of updates posted each day hasn't declined in the last year, even if the posting frequency went from 3-4 times a day down to the 1 time a day it's dropped to in the past couple months. But that one time a day update posted just as many new and updated projects as one would get before as far as I can recall.
I just simply can't believe this is really due to "low traffic" when traffic is defined as most of us use the term.
I'm pretty sure what they meant to say was "low ad income" instead...
We all used it as a way to learn about what had just come out, and discover new useful projects by watching/browsing interesting looking items on the feed. All it really was is an aggregator of update feeds... So lets build a new (RSS) aggregator/planet and reach out to the old Freshmeat projects/users to get them to move over?
If the functionality is pared right down it shouldn't even need logins or any of that stuff. Just make RSS links clearly visible and say to people "hey if you want to follow this project specifically, here's the link for your RSS reader!".
Don't you mean pain in the RSS? I've seen plenty of RSS icons that look like they say "ASS".
I did have to re-add the slashbox... but as I was too lazy to setup an RSS feed or even manually load the page, the slashbox was my portal to freshmeat.
I used to frequent it much more often back in the day, when I had time to explore and experiment with software. Still, there's always something interesting there to someone.
I even have an old Freshmeat.net black tee shirt from back in the day, with a fun "nutrition facts" label. Can't find even a close pic online.
Here's a random snapshot from circa 2000: http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/.vhost/...
I've just looked at github 'release' feature and I see that they implement it without much effort if they choose to. User can add release notes to particular tag and add binaries to download. Missing things: some summary page with releases, RSS/Atom feeds, tags for projects (eg. Java, Monitoring, CRM, Perl etc.) and versions (eg. Beta, Stable, Minor etc.), screenshots. My perception is that this can be fairly natural extension to their current feature set, fairly easy to implement. At least some of these features are not crucial and can be implemented separately. Lack of money from such features might be the only obstacle. I'm now writing 'feature request' e-mail to their support and I encourage everyone interested to do the same. Inform them that freshmeat.net is now dead and specify features you would like to have. Let's see how they'll react.
Freecode was useful to simply find out what new/updated software (sometimes not always free, hmmm...) had been recently released regardless of where the code is hosted. Is there any other site that provides such a list in date order? Suggesting Sourceforge as an alternative isn't great (I can't find a list of date-ordered project releases - not individual files, which are in one of their RSS feeds - on the Sourceforge site).
Agree, what would help a lot freshmeat would be a automatic link to sourceforce, github and friends. Developers would upload a new version and (if possible) flag it as a release and freshmeat would publish it automatically. Or allow the "update via new release mailling list". Forcing someone to enter freshmeat to update is a pain and push away many projects or keep the DB from showing obsolete versions.
Also, with this integration, better changelogs could be possible
Finally, keep a list of possible alternative software would help people searching, as one project can be dying and one can quickly find alternatives to it.
Simple things that could improve frehmeat and increase his traffic.
But no, instead they try to catch windows users by changing the name... and let it die
if they really wanted to catch windows users, they would need to add the most common windows software and create a "freshmeat" application that would flag and update the windows software (think ninite, but with both the closed source software and all the open freashmeat software)
I too will miss it
Higuita
The trouble with Freshmeat/Freecode was that they aggressively deleted entries when links broke. So if a project's homepage went down it would soon become unsearchable on the site. This reduced the site's usefulness as an archive of known free software. (Much better to keep the archived information and encourage people to fix the links - as a last resort, somebody who downloaded the tarball before the site went down could re-upload it somewhere.) Is there an alternative site which works as a kind of encylopaedia of free software? Github is great and all, but it is a project hosting site rather than an index of all software (which may be hosted externally and perhaps not even maintained in a public git repository).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I have access to a very large internet connection, and an array of servers. I would like to host something like that so it does not just die off. Do we think the community could do that? What would be needed would be some coder(s) to work on the front end and db. Unless of course Dice wants to fork ove the code (unlikely). I could think of a good domain name and just do it. Hell, I have an array of domain names as it is...
Anyone up for it?
I worked at freshmeat for fifteen years, and was surprised and saddened by today's news. I wrote down a few thoughts, if anyone would benefit from some behind-the-scenes perspective: http://jeffcovey.net/2014/06/1...
Our broken link policy (if we couldn't resolve the problem ourselves with Googling) was to write to the owner of the project listing, wait two weeks, send a reminder, wait five more days, then delete the listing if there was no response. The only time we would just delete a listing was when we couldn't track down any contact information for it. I apologize if you experienced anything other than this, it wasn't how we normally did things.
Yes that's right, the listing was deleted if you didn't respond. That tended to bite me as I would only check my personal email infrequently. I think that even if the listing owner disappeared completely, it would still be better to have an entry saying 'hey, this program exists, can you help find it?' and listing the last known whereabouts. But I see your point that you didn't just delete them without warning. Thanks for your work maintaining the site over many years.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Yes, it was Freshmeat. They changed the name about two years ago, though it still resolves to freecode.
I, for one, am very sad. Any time I was feeling like I had a bit too much time on my hands, I'd go to Freshmeat^WFreecode, and check out the newer projects. Almost always, something would catch my eye. And, yes, I still get their daily updates mailed to me, too. I'm wicked bummed. Though I do appear to be one of the relatively few who still use it, so I guess it's no big surprise.
Sad day.