Freshmeat / Freecode

» see freecode.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the first time i saw freshmeat was around 1999 or 2000, i had a red hat 6 install going on a spare pc and was hunting for a screensaver package that would compile against gnome 1. someone on a turkish linux forum linked to a freshmeat page. i clicked and landed on what looked like a newsroom for open-source software. every project had a page with a version number, a change log, a set of screenshots, and a small download link. the newest releases across the whole ecosystem rolled up onto the front page every day.

freshmeat had been running for about two years by then. patrick lenz, an austrian developer who went by scoop online, had launched it in 1997 as the first web-based aggregator of software release announcements. the name was a play on the mailing-list convention where new-project announcements would go out with the subject line "fresh meat." the site scaled with the linux boom of the late 1990s. by the time i found it, it was the release ticker for the whole open-source world.

the site got sold to open source development network in 2000, which became va software, which became geeknet. geeknet also owned slashdot and sourceforge. the three sites were siblings in the same office for the entire 2000s. dice holdings bought the media properties in 2012 for $20 million. by then freshmeat had been renamed freecode (october 2011) and had lost most of its editorial energy.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the value proposition was very tight. if you shipped an open-source project you posted your release announcement to freshmeat. the site normalized it into a project record with categories, tags, dependency notes, screenshots. anyone browsing the categories could find you. anyone subscribed to the rss feed of a category got a ping when a new project appeared. any editor writing about linux desktop tools could look up the last five releases in one place.

for a couple of years around 2001 to 2004 the freshmeat front page was one of my daily reads. i would scroll through the new releases the way people later scrolled through hacker news. most of it was noise, another point release of an obscure library or a niche kde applet, but occasionally there would be something that changed how you thought about the desktop.

~ the funny part ~

freshmeat did not die of one wound. it died of drift. sourceforge started serving as the release page itself. github came along and made the whole notion of a curated release index irrelevant, because every project had its own release page under its own url, and search engines could index them directly. the dice-era editorial team was reduced to almost nothing. the last few years of updates were mostly abandoned.

on 18 june 2014 the site stopped accepting new updates. the announcement said the reason was low traffic. no big shutdown, no data-loss event, just a page saying updates were suspended. the historical content stayed online because too many upstream projects still linked to it. dice sold the media portfolio to bizx in january 2016, which kept the archive up because deleting it would have broken a lot of external references.

~ the next chapter ~

what freshmeat modeled was carried forward by nobody in particular and by everyone at once. github release pages do a version of it. reddit's r/linux does a version of it. hacker news does a version of it. no single site plays the role freshmeat did in the early 2000s of being the daily digest for the whole open-source ecosystem. the whole category dissolved into distributed feeds.

the frozen freecode archive is still online at the time of writing, mostly as a fossil of what open-source discovery looked like before git hosting took over the release-page category. patrick lenz went on to a career at github. the freshmeat brand belongs to no one.

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