The demise of Freecode
Many long-time members of the free software community were surprised on June 18 to see the sudden announcement, seemingly without warning signs, that Freecode.com had discontinued operations. The site, which between 1997 and 2011 operated under the name Freshmeat.net, served as an index of free and open-source software projects and provided a steady news feed composed of the aggregated release announcements of thousands of indexed projects.
The shutdown notice makes it clear that the index will remain up and accessible for future reference, which has its benefits, but the news feed has been discontinued and no new updates will be made to existing entries:
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 is perhaps easy to forget how different the FOSS landscape looked in 1997. Certainly it was smaller, and it was also less connected. RSS was not created until 1999, and, naturally, took some time to rise in popularity and become a common method to publish news of any sort, release announcements included. Consequently, Freshmeat's ability to stay on top of releases from a wide variety of FOSS projects filled an important niche—and was certainly more convenient than subscribing to dozens or hundreds of mailing lists.
So, too, did Freshmeat's core index, which provided a searchable, categorized database of open-source projects, including the canonical home page for each project, basic information (such as the languages used and the platforms the project was created to run on), and a history of its previous releases. If today it sounds hard to believe that Freshmeat predated the advent of RSS, it is arguably more difficult to grasp that Freshmeat predated, at least by a small margin, the rise of Google.
Google's novel approach to indexing web content eventually made it relatively reliable to find the real home page for a software project of interest, but prior to Google PageRank, the other major search engine companies still relied largely on human-moderated indexes. Thus, they served as gatekeepers, and new sites had a very different path to follow from obscurity to fame. For a niche like free software, a dedicated index was far more accurate than a general-purpose portal like Yahoo's.
But Google did come along, and with it the way that people searched for and kept track of free software projects changed. At the same time, how and where those projects maintained their presence on the web has changed many times over as well. Whereas in the 1990s, SourceForge.net was one of the only (if not the only) hosting sites dedicated to open source software projects, today there are many more options, including Google Code, GitHub, Gitorious, and a wide range of self-hosting packages for popular web frameworks—in addition, of course, to the umbrella projects like GNU that host a large portion of the community's free software still.
One might think that the dispersal of project hosting services would serve to make a dedicated index like Freshmeat more valuable, but there were other forces at work at the same time that had the opposite effect. Package management for Linux distributions changed with the creation of Apt, yum, and related tools; users could increasingly rely on their Linux distribution to not only provide installable packages of relative freshness, but for the distribution's package index to serve as its own, ad-hoc index of the available packages themselves. And there are clearly far more ways to get the word out about a new release than there were in the late 1990s, perhaps more effectively. It may even be faster to spread the news via social media than to push an announcement out to a mailing list's subscribers.
Regardless of how the technical playing field has changed, though (and as everyone knows, it continues to change, arguably faster than ever), Freshmeat also had to function as a profitable business in order keep operating. Perhaps no one will ever know whether business calculations played a significant part in the decision to stop updating the site, but Freshmeat did change hands several times over the course of its lifespan. Dice.com acquired the site (at that point, renamed to Freecode) in 2012, after a lengthy tenure at Geeknet, the company that was formerly the corporate parent of SourceForge, Slashdot, and quite a few other related FOSS properties.
It is certainly possible that Dice.com simply did not know what to do with the site, or that its staff found the arrangement unsatisfactory. In his personal retrospective after the shutdown, longtime co-maintainer Jeff Covey noted that founder Patrick Lenz had left a year ago, after having been moved over to SourceForge operations for the preceding 18 months. Covey himself had been laid off in 2010, he said, brought back as a contractor, then voluntarily quit for personal reasons about three weeks before the shutdown. One of the other two remaining maintainers also left at the same time.
Covey notes with some regret that the departures seem to have precipitated the shutdown, which came as a surprise to him:
I especially regret that Patrick wasn’t included in the decision and that a more tasteful ending couldn’t have been arranged. The latest owners are just the custodians of a legacy built on years of work by a lot of good people. freshmeat has a hard-earned history we can all take pride in. It deserved a more dignified end than just flipping off the lights.
Certainly that series of events suggests that the decision for the shutdown had at least something to do with the interest level of its owners, rather than, say, friction with the maintainers. Nevertheless, people will inevitably speculate as to whether the root cause of the shutdown was a business issue or the many changes in the way that free software is deployed and discussed online over the past 17 years.
Has the FOSS community itself already moved on? That is difficult to assess quantitatively, at least from the outside. Certainly some people still feel that Freecode or a site like it is an important resource. On June 21, Eric S. Raymond posted a blog entry proposing a replacement site be created. He cites Freecode's independence from Linux distributions and project-hosting services, as well as its searchable index of project metadata, as vital features. Some of the same functionality is provided in other places, such as Ohloh, he notes, but none replicate the essential indexing and release-news features.
Time will tell if Raymond's proposal bears fruit; it certainly spawned a lengthy and detailed discussion among commenters. But even a full, functional replacement will only be a recreation of the now-gone original—and will, no doubt, have to cope with the same set of challenges as that original. Coping with them and delivering a valuable service for as long as Freshmeat/Freecode did would be a tall order to fill.