<story><title>What&apos;s in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode</title><url>http://freecode.com/articles/whats-in-a-name</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>supar</author><text>Freshmeat used to be a milestone of opensource software for a long time. It offered a good service for developers, including APIs, to publish your software and have it categorized. You hit the frontpage for every version, which would be a very nice publicity boost even for scarcely known applications. If you search through Ubuntu/Debian&apos;s repository you can still find a lot of helpers to &quot;release&quot; on freshmeat, which should give you an idea of how much freshmeat was entrenched in FOSS.&lt;p&gt;As an user, freshmeat was great. You could search by category, release type, language, environment, etc. Pretty much everything that was afterwards integrated in the sourceforge &quot;trove&quot; was pioneered by freshmeat. It was my go-to source for software just after an &quot;apt search&quot;. Yeah, the look was funky, but who cares? Most of the software was so technical that many simply didn&apos;t care.&lt;p&gt;Google would (and still does) return too much crap for pretty much any query regarding software, whereas freshmeat offered immediate insight though filtering, categorization and project statistics. I&apos;ve found so many gems on freshmeat that I would have never have found in Google (because of the sheer amount of results - mine being always one of the last ones), stackoverflow (field is too narrow) or github (which basically restricts to software developed with git, and is often incomplete).&lt;p&gt;They decided to redesign it a couple of years ago, and while they were at it they decided to throw away anything that was still good about it: search. Of course, the new trend was tag clouds, so you can guess, now projects are now categorized by tags. As such, it&apos;s now pretty much impossible to guess the correct tag/tags for a project. It&apos;s either a tag with a different spelling or a different word altogether. The tagging process is also too liberal: in the old freshmeat, you were encouraged to categorize your software in several hierarchical groups. As such, many projects would have a proper &quot;programming language&quot; category filled it, a proper &quot;operating environment&quot; (like command line, X11), etc. Searching was a breeze just because you were guided during the categorization.&lt;p&gt;Now it&apos;s basically the same as a google search: you either have too many results, or zero. Giving the programmers just a &quot;tags&quot; field to fill it has resulted in the archive having absolutely no consistency.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s a shame, really, because there&apos;s a lot of niche software (visualization, scientific tools operating of weird data, a lot of old stuff) that I can still only find on freshmeat.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve been thinking myself of re-implementing the old site simply as a rip-off just to have this archive back. It&apos;s sad that all they would think of now is change the name, because that&apos;s &lt;i&gt;irrelevant&lt;/i&gt; for the highly technical users which used to publish/search on freshmeat.</text></comment>
<story><title>What&apos;s in a name? Freshmeat is now Freecode</title><url>http://freecode.com/articles/whats-in-a-name</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sanswork</author><text>I haven&apos;t thought of Freshmeat in probably 8 years.  Amazing to see that they are still around.  Does anyone here actually actively use them anymore?  If so how?  Back in the day I would use it to watch for new releases of different types of software to try out and experiment with.</text></comment>