Why Freshmeat.net is obsolete

Monday, July 25th, 2005

Back in the good old days, Freshmeat.net was the source for getting your daily dosis of new Free Software/Open Source Linux programs. A single visit a day would keep you up-to-date on the lastest important software releases in the Open Source community.

Freshmeat’s target audience has always been hard to describe. In the beginning it catered to programs, tools and libraries for the Unix FOSS world. Then all kind of scripts started popping up: PHP webapplications, Python scripts, PERL stuff, etc. Then they added themes to the index. Next crept in the FOSS Windows software. Soon Non-FOSS Unix software followed. Nowadays, what audience isn’t targetted by Freshmeat? I can’t really think of one, truth be told.

Freshmeat is:

• not for FOSS software
  It also lists various closed source software packages.
• not for software running on FOSS Operating Systems
  Quite a number of Windows and MacOS applications are listed.
• not for Free (beer) software
  It also lists various software that needs to be payed for.
• not for End-user applications
  There’s a myriad of developers tools and libraries.
• not for traditional desktop applications
  Much server software is announced every day.
• not for ‘real’ programs
  There’s an annoyingly large ammount of web-applications in the index.
• not for software in general
  It also carries themes.

I honestly don’t know what Freshmeat’s supposed to carry anymore. Luckily, the Freshmeat’s About page provides a sollution:

freshmeat maintains the Web’s largest index of Unix and cross-platform software, themes and related “eye-candy”, and Palm OS software. Thousands of applications, which are preferably released under an open source license

Quite broad, isn’t it? Also somewhat incorrect, as I seem to recall many non-portable Windows programs pass by on the frontpage.

I almost never visit Freshmeat anymore, unless I’m looking for some particular Unix program which I can’t find on Gnomefiles or google. I’ve taken it out of my RSS reader since the ammount of crap software (read: web applications, java, scripts, libraries, etc, etc) has long since surpassed the ‘traditional’ software.

I know I shouldn’t be the one to complain, since I’ve also got some web applications listed on it. Plus, who am I to tell Freshmeat.net what what categories it should adhere too? It’s just a shame I now don’t have a regular page to go to for my daily injection of FOSS release news.

(And, yes, I know I can log in and filter out categories. But, honestly, I’m too lazy to log in each time and the ‘Remember me’ option never seems to work for me. That and the fact that it doesn’t provide filtered RSS feeds makes freshmeat quite useless for me)