Founded | June 16, 1997 |
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Type | 501(c)(3) |
Location |
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Fields | Software |
Key people | Michael Schultheiss (President) Stephen Frost (Vice President) [1] |
Revenue |
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Expenses |
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Website | www |
Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI) is a US 501(c)(3) non-profit organization domiciled in New York State formed to help other organizations create and distribute free open-source software and open-source hardware. Anyone is eligible to apply for membership, and contributing membership is available to those who participate in the free software community.
SPI was originally created to allow the Debian Project to accept donations. [2] It now acts as a fiscal sponsor to many free and open source projects.
SPI has hosted Wikimedia Foundation board elections and audited the tally as a neutral third party from 2007 to 2011. [3] [4]
The 44 currently associated projects of SPI are: [5]
Its current board is composed of: [7]
GNU is an extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popularly known as Linux. Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL).
A Linux distribution is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro, if distributed on its own, is often obtained via a website intended specifically for the purpose. Distros have been designed for a wide variety of systems ranging from personal computers to servers and from embedded devices to supercomputers.
Gentoo Linux is a Linux distribution built using the Portage package management system. Unlike a binary software distribution, the source code is compiled locally according to the user's preferences and is often optimized for the specific type of computer. Precompiled binaries are available for some packages. Gentoo runs on a wide variety of processor architectures.
Tenés Empanadas Graciela (TEG) is a turn-based strategy game distributed by several popular Linux distributions. The idea for this free and open-source software program came from the board game TEG, which itself is based on the strategy board game Risk but differs in many aspects of the rules.
Bdale Garbee is an American computer specialist who works with Linux, particularly Debian. He is also an amateur radio hobbyist (KB0G), and a member of AMSAT, Tucson Amateur Packet Radio, and the American Radio Relay League. As of 2023 he is the President of Amateur Radio Digital Communications.
Technical variations of Linux distributions include support for different hardware devices and systems or software package configurations. Organizational differences may be motivated by historical reasons. Other criteria include security, including how quickly security upgrades are available; ease of package management; and number of packages available.
Martin Michlmayr is a free and open-source software advocate and Debian developer, formerly president of Software in the Public Interest.
Benjamin Mako Hill is a free software activist, hacker, author, and professor. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the co-author of three technical manuals on the subject, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and The Official Ubuntu Book.
SageMath is a computer algebra system (CAS) with features covering many aspects of mathematics, including algebra, combinatorics, graph theory, group theory, differentiable manifolds, numerical analysis, number theory, calculus and statistics.
Openmoko is a discontinued project to create a family of mobile phones that are open source, including the hardware specification, the operating system, and actual smartphone development implementation like the Neo 1973 and Neo FreeRunner. The whole project was sponsored by Openmoko Inc.
GNU variants are operating systems based upon the GNU operating system. According to the GNU project and others, these also include most operating systems using the Linux kernel and a few others using BSD-based kernels.
WeeChat is a free and open-source Internet Relay Chat client that is designed to be light and fast. It is released under the terms of the GNU GPL-3.0-or-later and has been developed since 2003.
According to the Free Software Foundation Latin America, Linux-libre is a modified version of the Linux kernel that contains no binary blobs, obfuscated code, or code released under proprietary licenses. In the Linux kernel, those types of code are mostly used for proprietary firmware images. While generally redistributable, they do not give the user the freedom to audit, modify, or, consequently, redistribute their modified versions. The GNU Project keeps Linux-libre in synchronization with the mainline Linux kernel.
Dracut is a set of tools that provide enhanced functionality for automating the Linux boot process. The tool named dracut is used to create a Linux boot image (initramfs) by copying tools and files from an installed system and combining it with the Dracut framework, which is usually found in /usr/lib/dracut/modules.d.
GNOME SoundConverter is an unofficial GNOME-based free and open-source transcoder for digital audio files. It uses GStreamer for input and output files. It has multi threaded design and can also extract the audio from video files.
LibRaw is a free and open-source software library for reading raw files from digital cameras. It supports virtually all raw formats. It is based on the source code of dcraw, with modifications, and "is intended for embedding in raw converters, data analyzers, and other programs using raw files as the initial data."
GNOME Terminator is a free and open-source terminal emulator for Linux programmed in Python, licensed under GPL-2.0-only. The goal of the project is to produce a useful tool for arranging terminals. It is inspired by programs such as gnome-multi-term, QuadKonsole, etc. In that the main focus is arranging terminals in grids. Terminator packages exist for Arch, Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Gentoo, Snap, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. In 2017 took second place in voting at opensource.com, after Gnome Terminal.