R.I.P Freshmeat

by
in internet on (#3P6)
You might remember Freshmeat, a hacker site whose name was changed in 2011 to FreeCode (to me, it will always be Freshmeat). Freshmeat kept track of software packages, their newest versions, change logs, and updates. For project developers, it was a great way to get the word out about improvements to their software. For users, it was a spectacular way to search for and discover interesting and useful software. While not totally devoted to open source software, the bulk of the software was for Unix and Linux systems, and much of it was open source.

In 2012, FreeCode was bought by Dice Holdings, along with Slashdot and the rest of Geeknet's sites, for $20M. Two years later (ie, yesterday), it was dead in the water.

As of yesterday, visitors to Freecode.com will see "Effective 2014-06-18 Freecode is no longer being updated (content may be stale)." Turns out, Freecode.com wasn't generating enough revenue via page impressions of ads, and Dice Holdings decided to stick a knife in its heart, explaining:
The Freecode site has been moved to a static state effective June 18, 2014 due to low traffic levels and so that folks will focus on more useful endeavors than site upkeep. The site contents have been retained in this static state as a continued path to access the linked software, much of which is on self-hosted servers and would be difficult to find otherwise.
It might seem better than nothing to just freeze FreeCode into a static site, but a site whose purpose is to track the latest and greatest is dead in the water if all of its information was frozen on 18 June. Rest in Peace, Freshmeat. [ed. note: Is it now rotten meat? Because I see flies on the carcass].

Ohloh (Score: 2, Informative)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-06-24 20:48 (#292)

There is a similar site called Ohloh that has been active for a few years now: https://www.ohloh.net/
Ohloh is a free, public directory of Free and Open Source Software and the contributors who create and maintain it. Ohloh Code is a publicly available, free code search site that indexes most of the projects in Ohloh.

Ohloh is editable by everyone, like a wiki. All are welcome to join and add new projects, and to make corrections to existing project pages. This public review helps to make Ohloh one of the largest, most accurate, and up-to-date FOSS software directories available. We encourage contributors to join Ohloh and claim their commits on existing projects and add projects not yet on Ohloh, to assemble a complete profile of all their FOSS code contributions.

Ohloh is not a forge - it does not host projects and code. Ohloh is a directory, a community, and analytics and search services. By connecting to project source code repositories, analyzing both the code's history and ongoing updates, and attributing those updates to specific contributors, Ohloh can provide reports about the composition and activity of project code bases, and aggregate this data to track the changing demographics of the FOSS world.
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