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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.
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..."
I never thought I'd see an "open source" project hosting site devolve to a state that makes CNet Downloads look good.
Indeed. They even include ads that look like fake "Download" buttons (bigger than the download link), and I've even seen installers embed things like McAfee trials and adware in the installers. It's gotten so bad, my company blocks SourceForge downloads at the proxy.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
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)
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.
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.
I used to publish releases of my software on freecode.com, so I'm quite angry about this. Actually, every time I've published release on freecode.com, traffic to my project site increased substantially, so I conclude 'lack of traffic' is a bunch of lies spewed by Dice corporate drones and real purpose is just to kill it off and block independent developers.
Freshmeat did one thing and did it well. Now I cannot find alternative sites that would do this in similiar way - so called 'alternatives' are either ad-ridden to the point of being useless or are not maintained on regular basis. If anyone knows similar and useful site, please let me know.
I would ask Dice if they would donate freshmeat.net domain name to a group of people interested in recreating something like this. It would expose their intentions quite clearly. Should they refuse -> they're interested in killing off this site regardless of costs/utility/users/etc. (and this would implicate that their 'lack of traffic' is propably a lie).
Maybe asking some well managed companies like Github if they're interested in filling this market niche would be another solution.
Anyway, if there is enough people interested in recreating such index, I'm ready to donate some of my time and effort (granted that no company is interested in this and no real alternatives do exist).