A former coworker pointed me to the news today that freshmeat has suddenly ceased operations. I spent the rest of the day flooded with memories and the urge to jot a few of them down before they’re lost. Perhaps they’ll have some nostalgia value if you were part of that scene in those days.

I was the first hire when freshmeat was bought by Andover.net in 1999, and enjoyed the privilege of working with Patrick (scoop), Daniel, Steve, and the rest of the crew for the last fifteen years. I managed the site and the staff on a day-to-day basis, provided customer support, and wrote and solicited articles. I was on salary there until finally caught by one of the rounds of layoffs in 2010, then came back as a contractor within a year and remained on the staff until I quit just three weeks ago.

For anyone interested, here’s freshmeat’s history from my perspective (I joined it two years into its life). First, the corporate story that shaped its path:

Keeping letterhead companies in business

Andover Technologies (if memory serves) became Andover.net, which was bought by VA Research, which became VA Linux Systems, which became VA Linux, which became VA Software, which became SourceForge. This mother company bought or invented websites and bundled them into a media branch called OSDN, which became OSTG, which became Geeknet, into which SourceForge folded before it was all sold to Dice.

Did I forget any steps there? It was a dizzying shell game. Generously, you might say the name changed each time a new direction was chosen. You might also say it was to distract from the fact that the latest strategy flopped yet again.

The awkward, meandering path traced all the way back to the first, strange acquisition by VA Research, rumored to have been made just because the CEO thought it would be cool to own Slashdot. (Robin says it was to stop development of Patrick’s SourceForge competitor Server 51, and Eric Raymond has another version in the comments below.) VA sold hardware running Linux. The question of what that had to do with a Web publishing company was… never answered. They became the corporate face of Linux, acquiring linux.com and issuing a record-setting IPO as LNUX. They hired some of the best Linux programmers and kernel hackers and bought Andover, and we all sat around looking at each other and waiting to be told what we were supposed to be doing together. I don’t remember anyone ever even pretending there was an answer. At best, they acted mysterious, as though some grand master plan would eventually be revealed.

VA wanted to b