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More than fourteen years ago, I was configuring Linux-based server systems for customers. I was quickly losing track of the then-current versions of the applications I needed to install in order to make those servers perform their intended tasks. Those were the early days of the Web, database-driven websites were almost unheard of, and I didn’t have the slightest idea about programming.

One night during the fall of 1997, I started cobbling together a static HTML page containing the latest version numbers and links to the websites of the Linux kernel, the Apache webserver, and Vi, respectively. The page was using a table-based layout, used <font> tags all over the place, and was in desperate need of a name.

Tossing around a few combinations of words in my sleep-deprived head I came up with a working title for my little version-tracking page – and freshmeat was born. Little did I know that this brand would survive the dot-com bubble, see services like Google, Wikipedia, and Twitter grow to a massive scale, and be accessed from mobile phones and tablet computers over fast broadband connections.

Times change.

freshmeat has operated under the radar of its parent company Geeknet for more than a decade, while numerous sales teams have struggled to position the freshmeat brand appropriately among potential sponsors in the United States. Outside of our very own small niche of the Web, people have all sorts of associations with the name freshmeat, most of which have nothing to do with a free, open source software directory.

Due to the nature of our offering, which makes content and services available to developers and end-users for free, we rely on ad revenue to keep the lights on.

Since all of us at Geeknet agree that this site and the community powering it have tremendous potential, even after more than 14 years of existence, we decided to change the name of the site, effective immediately, to Freecode.

With this new name we expect a huge leap forward in the ability to position the site commercially, without additional efforts required to explain the name. This should result in better ad products displayed on the site, which means a better site experience for you, our users, and more resources for our community. Freecode will also be more attractive and less ambiguous to new users.

I am the first to admit that it took me a moment to realize that this change was needed. I hope I can count on you for your continued support of our efforts, now under the new name Freecode.

As always, please send your feedback our way on Twitter or on our help forum.

Sincerely,
Patrick Lenz
Site director Freecode

The database migration of the old data set has just finished. Welcome to the brand new freshmeat.net.

We still have a few open loops to close, but we wanted to bring the site back up first.

Read on for a few brief comments on the current site status.

After a successful beta test of the new site software on its launchpad at freshmeat3.net we're going to relaunch the real site this Saturday, March 14th. Please be aware that the site will be inaccessible while we transfer the database content from the old structure into the new site. We'll post a more detailed migration plan as soon as possible.

In the meantime, if you have last minute wishes or feedback, please don't hesitate to register for a beta account at freshmeat3.net/beta_signups/new. We highly value your voice.

Thank you for your continued support.

We'd like to highlight some of the aspects of the latest incarnation of freshmeat.net in a few short articles. We hope to point out features you may have missed and share some of the reasoning behind our design decisions with our long-time users. We hope you enjoy the new site, and look forward to your thoughtfully-considered and kindly-worded comments and suggestions. In this installment: Changes to our plans for categorizing projects.

We'd like to highlight some of the aspects of the latest incarnation of freshmeat.net in a few short articles. We hope to point out features you may have missed and share some of the reasoning behind our design decisions with our long-time users. We hope you enjoy the new site, and look forward to your thoughtfully-considered and kindly-worded comments and suggestions. In this installment: User interface changes.

We'd like to highlight some of the aspects of the latest incarnation of freshmeat.net in a few short articles. We hope to point out features you may have missed and share some of the reasoning behind our design decisions with our long-time users. We hope you enjoy the new site, and look forward to your thoughtfully-considered and kindly-worded comments and suggestions. In this installment: Tagging, and Trove No More.

We'd like to highlight some of the aspects of the latest incarnation of freshmeat.net in a few short articles. We hope to point out features you may have missed and share some of the reasoning behind our design decisions with our long-time users. We hope you enjoy the new site, and look forward to your thoughtfully-considered and kindly-worded comments and suggestions. In this installment: Ways managing project listings has been made easier for authors.

As undoubtedly many of you have noticed, things have been fairly quiet on the site development front here at freshmeat.net. During the past several months, we've rethought some of the core concepts behind the site and developed a new platform to operate upon.

However, I'd like to seek active participation of our loyal community in ironing out bugs, soliciting feedback about design decisions we made, and ask for general suggestions and improvements before we make the big switch in a little while.

But let me put some of my ideas and motivation behind this new version out in the open first.

Way back when it was still in fashion (no religious wars please) to read your news in a newsreader, freshmeat.net was one of the few sites that distributed its articles and release announcements via the wonders of NNTP. And we still do that today (with a minor interruption when we moved datacenters).

But that was then and this is now. Nowadays people use RSS readers to keep tabs on their favorite sites and freshmeat.net readers are no different. In fact, our newsserver has so little traffic that we have collectively decided that the cost of maintenance to keep this service up is not justified by the usage it gets.

Therefore I herely officially announce the retirement of the news.freshmeat.net newsgroups effective July 15th, 2008.

Stronger offerings of RSS-based subscriptions will be made available over the course of this year.

Thank you for your continued support.

This coming Sunday, June 1st at 07:00 UTC (view this time in your timezone) freshmeat.net will move out of the current location on the west coast into the brand new SourceForge, Inc. datacenter on the east coast. The switch itself should be brief. Please allow a downtime of 1-2 hours though should the data synchronization processes not proceed as smoothly as planned and tested.

While we will shortly drop the TTL (time to live) on our nameservers, you may still experience that access to the freshmeat.net domain routes you to the old datacenter, in which case we will redirect you over to the new one with a slightly changed hostname your local nameservers are unlikely to have cached.

We are also moving onto brand new machines that have been re-installed from scratch. If you experience any bugs or oddities in site behavior after the switch, please don't hesitate to submit a trouble ticket through our contact page. As always, please be as specific as possible to ease reproduction of your problem and speed up the solution.

Thanks for your understanding and we'll see you on the other side.

Update: We've moved. Welcome to the new farm. Please bear with us while we bring back the rest of the services.

Update #2: We should be all set. As mentioned above, if you run into a brick wall anywhere, please let us know. Thank you for your patience.

Software is only as useful as its users' ability to understand and use it. Questions arise, problems are faced, and feedback needs to get through. Unfortunately, traditional methods of enabling the conversation between users and developers have been slow and impersonal. Today, we hope to bring speed, ease, and a human element to the interaction.

Despite begging, cajoling, writing FAQs, and renaming our "report problem" link to "broken links", we've never been able to convince everyone that http://freshmeat.net/contact/ is for writing us with problems with freshmeat itself. We still get a few messages each day from people asking why BloggyBlog 3.17 won't post their parakeet photos or telling us about misspellings in the Swedish translation of our firewall script. Until now, we've had to express our regret that we only list information about the 40,000 projects on our site, and can't provide tech support for them all. Today, we're happy to announce that's all changing.

The past year has seen the rise of a controversial but unavoidable medium, The Blog. While blogs are not new, and many trace their spirit and much of their content back to the much-lamented baby-photo-infested personal homepages of the early Web, this has been the year in which they've gained wide audiences rivaling those of traditional news sources. I'm not too proud to say that this has left us at freshmeat feeling a little inadequate.

These are divisive times, and the once-lauded principle of respect between peoples seems to break down more every day with us-against-them boundaries on political, religious, and geographic lines. The connective powers of the Internet offer one means of countering this trend, and at freshmeat, we'd like to do our small part for celebrating diversity.

freshmeat.net is primarily a Web-accessible database. However, apart from requesting interface improvements for the Web part, a lot of people requested scriptable access to our database. As of this writing, we have the first version of our XML-RPC API available for you to use (that's not abuse there!). Click below for details and API specs.

Today I'd like to talk about the additional freshmeat.net features that have been implemented over the course of the last months.

Starting off I'd like to thank all of you making regular suggestions for improvement. We welcome each and every feedback we get from our users and it's a pleasure for us to implement features you request. This doesn't always happen in a timely manner, but eventually we'll get around to it. Thanks again.

Handheld computing has progressed, and Palm is no longer the near-monopolist of the market. We've decided to rename our Palm section and welcome a greater variety of mobile computing software.

During the boom years, broadband Internet access was a fact of many freshmeat users' lives. In the new millennium, many have found that their return to the basement of the parental home has coincided with a reintroduction to an old friend, the 56k modem. Others in developing countries like Nigeria and Idaho wish they had access to even that much bandwidth. Today, we're happy to announce that we will soon be providing a service which many of you have requested.

The expansions of the past year have left us in need of some extra help. If you or someone you know would be interested in working at freshmeat, please read this article.

We've had trove nodes for the Mac OS X operating system and the Mac OS X Carbon and Cocoa frameworks for ages. We've had an OS X package download link for ages. Now we officially have a whole freshmeat section devoted to the next generation of Apple's operating system. Click the link to read the full story.

After a slightly failed move the day it was originally intended (Wednesday) we were finally able to shift the site over to the new cluster at Exodus West today. Looks like we've been fooled once again by the VM in kernels newer than 2.4.9. After downgrading the database servers to that magic revision everything suddenly sprang back to speed. Click below for the rest of the deal.

As many of you might have followed along, all OSDN websites are being moved from a co-location center from the east coast to a different co-location center on the west coast. freshmeat's next (or last) to move starting today, so if you see any service disruption, bear with us as we move all machine duties from here to there. OSDN netop have already duplicated the freshmeat cluster in the new center so moving should actually not be very noticable for users. But as usual, one's not always aware of all things that can possibly break. Thanks for your attention and have a nice day.

On September 11, 2002 OSDN and all of its affiliated Web sites will host an entire day free of advertising. We will do this in remembrance of September 11, 2001 as a tribute to all of the heroes and victims of that tragic day. We will resume all advertising at 12:01 US EDT on September 12. OSDN would like to thank our customers for supporting us in this action.

Most Sincerely,

Richard French
General Manager
OSDN

This article is a lost cause. Five minutes after it appears on freshmeat, one of you will come up with another clever feature, scoop will implement it, and this will be out-of-date. (In fact, it's happened as I was writing it, and required a revision.) More importantly, the people who most need to read it... won't. Still, like many lost causes, it's a noble one, so let's give it a try.

Themes.org has become part of freshmeat today. I'd like to share a short history of the site and explain the reasons behind the decision to do this.

It's been a little over a year since the major code revision that led to freshmeat ][. The Web waits for no man, and the time has come to make sure we're in step with recent developments. Today, we're happy to announce our new name and our plans to incorporate important new technologies into the site.

As you may or may not have noticed, freshmeat has suffered from some major downtime from 11am EST to 5pm EST. Both database servers crashed hard and refused to boot with various kernel revisions and mylex driver modules. OSDN's netop staff worked hard to get a replacement machine up and running which neither cooperated nicely at first. The site is up in semi-stable state right now and searches are still disabled while we're working on getting the search database server back up and running. Please bear with us and sorry for the inconvenience.

We've been carrying our old 2-level categorization scheme with us since the date we switched to the freshmeat II codebase on Jan 30th 2001. Over the course of the past year, people have been able to move their projects from the old category scheme to the new scheme. We have also repeatedly contacted developers, encouraging them to update their project's categorization. Effective today, all categories left over from freshmeat I have been eliminated.

One of the problems with a software index like freshmeat's projects database is that people who wander into a category for the first time have difficulty determining which of the listed projects best suit their needs, which are ready for use, and which are in the early stages of development. They resort to downloading deadends and waste a lot of time before they find what they need, or they just give up. Today, we're starting a new series of articles that hopes to counter this problem with insights from people who are knowledgeable about specific types of software.

By now, you've all had time to wander through freshmeat ][ and get the lay of the land. You've found your way around the Trove category system we've adopted, and many of you have recategorized your projects to fit into the Trove map, so people browsing through it will find your work. (Those of you who haven't are heartily encouraged to use the "recategorize" function on the project menu on your project's page. :) You may have noticed that there are categories available for software that runs on several operating systems, and that one of them is for PalmOS projects.