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The following is a list of notable websites that list free software projects. These directories and repositories of free software differ from software hosting facilities (or software forges) in the number of features they offer and the type of collaboration they are designed to promote.
| Name | Description, focus |
|---|---|
| SourceForge | largest directory, >500K projects [1] |
| Apache Software Foundation | Mostly Java [2] |
| Free Software Directory [3] | About 17000 packages with 386 GNU-packages and 97 High Priority Projects [4] |
| Open Hub (Formerly Ohloh) | |
| Libraries.io | Open source libraries, frameworks and tools |
| ibiblio | Open source software |
| List of free and open-source software packages | |
| AlternativeTo | General: can filter by license type "Open Source" |
| Name | Description, focus |
|---|---|
| CPAN | Perl |
| CTAN | TeX |
| CRAN | R |
| Gambas Software Farm | Gambas |
| JBoss | Enterprise Java |
| LuaRocks | Lua |
| PEAR | PHP |
| Node Package Manager | Node.js |
| Python Package Index | Python |
| Hackage | Haskell |
| RubyGems | Ruby |
SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirroring of downloads for load balancing, a wiki for documentation, developer and user mailing lists, user-support forums, user-written reviews and ratings, a news bulletin, micro-blog for publishing project updates, and other features.
rsync is a utility for transferring and synchronizing files between a computer and a storage drive and across networked computers by comparing the modification times and sizes of files. It is commonly found on Unix-like operating systems and is under the GPL-3.0-or-later license.
GNU Savannah is a project of the Free Software Foundation initiated by Loïc Dachary, which serves as a collaborative software development management system for free software projects. Savannah currently offers CVS, GNU arch, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, mailing list, web hosting, file hosting, and bug tracking services. Savannah initially ran on the same SourceForge software that at the time was used to run the SourceForge portal.
BerliOS is a project founded by the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS), Berlin, to coordinate the different interest groups in the field of open source software (OSS) and to assume a neutral coordinator function. The target groups of BerliOS were developers and users of open source software on the one side and OSS-related companies on the other. As of January 1, 2022 its website was still accessible, though hosting no projects.
7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own archive format called 7z, but can read and write several others.
Freecode, formerly Freshmeat, was a website owned by BIZX, Inc., hosting mainly open-source software for programmers and developers. Among other things, the site also hosted user reviews and discussions. While a majority of the software covered is open source for Unix-like systems, Freecode also covered releases of closed-source, commercial and cross-platform software on Mac OS X and handhelds. Freecode was notable for its age, having started in 1997 as the first web-based aggregator of software releases.
Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware or simply Tiki, originally known as TikiWiki, is a free and open source Wiki-based content management system and online office suite written primarily in PHP and distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL-2.1-only) license. In addition to enabling websites and portals on the internet and on intranets and extranets, Tiki contains a number of collaboration features allowing it to operate as a Geospatial Content Management System (GeoCMS) and Groupware web application.
Windows Installer XML Toolset is a free software toolset that builds Windows Installer packages from XML. It consists of a command-line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to build MSI and MSM packages. WiX was the first Microsoft project to be released under an open-source license, the Common Public License. It was also the first Microsoft project to be hosted on an external website.
FileZilla is a free and open-source, cross-platform FTP application, consisting of FileZilla Client and FileZilla Server. Clients are available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Both server and client support FTP and FTPS, while the client can in addition connect to SFTP servers. FileZilla's source code is hosted on SourceForge.
Notepad++, is a text and source code editor for use with Microsoft Windows. It supports tabbed editing, which allows working with multiple open files in one window. The program's name comes from the C postfix increment operator.
Git is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers who are developing software collaboratively.
In software development, a codebase is a collection of source code used to build a particular software system, application, or software component. Typically, a codebase includes only human-written source code system files; thus, a codebase usually does not include source code files generated by tools or binary library files, as they can be built from the human-written source code. However, it generally does include configuration and property files, as they are the data necessary for the build.
A source-code-hosting facility is a file archive and web hosting facility for source code of software, documentation, web pages, and other works, accessible either publicly or privately. They are often used by open-source software projects and other multi-developer projects to maintain revision and version history, or version control. Many repositories provide a bug tracking system, and offer release management, mailing lists, and wiki-based project documentation. Software authors generally retain their copyright when software is posted to a code hosting facilities.
CodePlex was a forge website by Microsoft. While it was active, it allowed shared development of open-source software. Its features included wiki pages, source control based on Mercurial, TFVC, Subversion or Git, discussion forums, issue tracking, project tagging, RSS support, statistics, and releases.
GNU Bazaar is a distributed and client–server revision control system sponsored by Canonical.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to free software and the free software movement:
In free and open-source software (FOSS) development communities, a forge is a web-based collaborative software platform for both developing and sharing computer applications.
In version control systems, a repository is a data structure that stores metadata for a set of files or directory structure. Depending on whether the version control system in use is distributed, like Git or Mercurial, or centralized, like Subversion, CVS, or Perforce, the whole set of information in the repository may be duplicated on every user's system or may be maintained on a single server. Some of the metadata that a repository contains includes, among other things, a historical record of changes in the repository, a set of commit objects, and a set of references to commit objects, called heads.
Double Commander is a dual-pane file manager. It is a free and open-source software licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It is designed to be operated by a keyboard, a mouse, or by both at the same time.
Gitea is a forge software package for hosting software development version control using Git as well as other collaborative features like bug tracking, code review, continuous integration, kanban boards, tickets, and wikis. It supports self-hosting but also provides a free public first-party instance. It is a fork of Gogs and is written in Go. Gitea can be hosted on all platforms supported by Go including Linux, macOS, and Windows. The project is funded on Open Collective.
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