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

This will explain how to find Free Software in general.

The Problem

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 must be the software we should find on that web sites. The flexible parts of the guideline will be considered also excepting they will alow (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 beying proprietary.
  • Proprietary and free lists: sites that link to both free and proprietary software but also don't mark the licence of software.
• Presentation: please mark if the list itself if free or proprietary.

The Solution

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-pupose 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 nead more feedback.

First of all, know how to find solutions.

Solutions: Only free

• Listings
  • The software directory from the Free Software Foundation (free content)
  • swik inspired by wiki, users can edit (free content, not yet the software used)
  • Debianlinux is well done (100% Free Software?) (?? content)
  • framasoft in many languages (including english) (?? content)
  • A collection of free software including anti-virus, anti-spam and Linux distributions.

Solutions: Also proprietary but marked:

• Organized content
  • Your first source for solutions should be HowTo.
  • Try other Wikibooks and Wikipedia in diferent langueges. 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)

Solutions: 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)

Other pages

Related HowTos

• Find solutions (where to).
• Hosting my Free Software project (What online services can i use for)
• Forums related to a free kernel (What are the main)
• Forums related to distributions (What are the main)
• IRC chat networks related to free software and open content (What are the main)

Clarifications and Comments

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
  • CIA not specialy to find software, but to spy on the developpement.

Excluded (but mentioned)

• Open Directory Project, Google dirctories 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 licence. We do not recomand this links only as seccond posibility.
• Sourceforge is for software developpement, but as all software is on freshmeat, there is no nead 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.