How to find FOSS (Free Software and Open Source software)

We try to list here web sites that help finding free software.

Motivation

Many people write software for their own needs. It's important for them to share it with the user community, and to have as much free software as possible easily accessible. A negative result of that not happening is that there are a lot of duplicate programs. It is helpful to have web pages that list software, but when the number of programs grows exponentially, it becomes difficult to select the best programs from a long list, when many aren't finished or are of low-quality.

Guidelines

• Free software and open source software (FOSS) must be the software we should find on that web sites. The flexible parts of the guideline will be considered also excepting they will allow (but try to avoid) sites that also point to proprietary software.
• Presentation: please group in 3 categories:
  • Only free: sites that only link to free software as much as possible
  • Also proprietary but marked: that link also to proprietary software but that clearly mark them as being proprietary.
  • Proprietary and free lists: sites that link to both free and proprietary software but also don't mark the license of software.
• Presentation: please mark if the list itself is free or proprietary.

Description

This page will help people that build HowTo to find software and to enhance HowTo. You can use it if you don't find a good solution on HowTo, or if you would like to investigate more because the answers here may not be ok for you. If you do so, it means you will spend time. Please come back and publish your results in 5% of the time you spent searching. We can then maybe integrate it in HowTo so that the next time people will be satisfied with only HowTo.

We just link to general-purpose sites about Free Software, not about specific software. This is required in order to be a practical guide. This article is not yet finished, we need more feedback.

First of all, know how to find solutions.

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• Listings
  • Free and Open Source Wikia - user editable FOSS database
  • The software directory from the Free Software Foundation (free content)
  • SourceForge - "world's largest Open Source software development web site"—users encouraged to create, participate, evaluate
  • Free Software Catalog - a collection of the best free software and online services that includes open source and freeware
  • Ohloh - open source projects listed with project and developer metrics
  • Open source directory from Open Source Scripts (free content)
  • SWiK open source wiki, users can edit (free content, not yet the software used)
  • debian package tag browser (?? content)
  • Debianlinux is well done (100% Free Software?) (?? content)
  • framasoft in many languages (including English) (?? content)
  • OS Reviews Reviews of free and open source software (free content)
  • dp2p.net Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Network Software (GPL P2P Software)
  • Free Web Software (GPL Web Software)
  • LiveDistro Copyleft Operating Systems (GPL Operating Systems)

Also proprietary but marked

• Organized content
  • Your first source for solutions should be HowTo.
  • Try other Wikibooks and Wikipedia in different languages. They all have sections related to software and long lists of software for each category. (free content)
• Listings
  • Freshmeat was, and still is ;), the most important collection of Free Software ever. (proprietary? content)
  • IceWALKERS (proprietary content)
  • GnomeFiles is restricted to gtk-based applications. (proprietary content)
  • KDE Apps is restricted to KDE applications. (proprietary content?)
• Equivalents
  • win-lin-soft/table-eng good if you go from Windo to a distribution based on a free kernel like Linux (free content)
  • oos equiv good if you search for free replacements of proprietary software (?? content)
• Public blogs
  • Slashdot was, and still is ;), the most popular of internet blogs ever. Its readers are not strangers to Free Software (on the contrary). (proprietary content owned by the users who post)

Also proprietary not marked as

• Listings
  • The loll project maintains a GPL-ed list related to Free Software mostly (free content)
  • Yo Linux (proprietary content)
  • linuxsoft (proprietary content)

Related HowTos

• Find solutions (where to).
• How to Find Free Software and Open Source Programs
• How to find free and open source computer games
• Forums related to a free kernel (What are the main)
• Forums related to distributions (What are the main)

May also be

• List here possible candidates. After discussion on the discussion page they may be included in the official list. If this hapends some of the entries in the opfficial list may come here in order to keep the list not too big.
  • Linux links proprietary list

Excluded (but mentioned)

• Open Directory Project, Google directories and Yahoo directory has sections related to software. However it is extremely difficult to identify all free software fom non-free software as you can't see the license. We do not recommended this links only as second possibility.
• Sourceforge is for software development, but as all software is on freshmeat, there is no need to mention Sourceforge. The same with Savannah, Berlios and other.
• list on wikipedia - not complete at all

Clarifications

• Here will be some information to help you understand in what way this article was subjective in order to stay practical.

From HowTo Wiki, a Wikia wiki.