The Free Software Directory (FSD) is a project of the

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985. The organisation supports the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

(FSF). It catalogs

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

that runs under free

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s—particularly GNU and

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

. The cataloged projects are often able to run in several other operating systems. The project was formerly co-run by

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) with the aim of promoting world peace and International secur ...

. Unlike some other directories that focus on free software, Free Software Directory staff verify the licenses of software listed in the directory.

Coverage growth and usages

FSD has been used as a source for assessing the share of free software, for example finding in September 2002 an amount of "1550 entries, of which 1363 (87.9%) used the GPL license, 103 (6.6%) used the LGPL license, 32 (2.0%) used a BSD or BSD-like license, 29 (1.9%) used the Artistic license, 5 (0.3%) used the MIT license". By September 2009, the Directory listed 6,000 packages whose number grew up to 6,500 in October 2011, when the newly updated directory was launched. All listed packages are "free for any computer user to download, run and share. Each entry is individually checked and tested ... so users know that any program they come across in the directory will be truly free software ... with free documentation and without proprietary software requirements". Several scientific publications review or refer to the directory. It has been remarked that the Directory "only includes software that runs on free operating systems. The FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory is also a collaborative project, offering a web interface for users to enter and update entries". Among the critical issues of the previous version, it has been pointed out that while "available software is described using a variety of textual metadata, including the components upon which a particular piece of software depends", "unfortunately, those dependencies are only listed by name, and locating and retrieving them is left to the user". On the other hand, the accuracy of the directory review on licenses is acknowledged. The code review from the directory's editorial board is suitable for obtaining statistics on subsets of free software packages reliably clustered by license. In September 2011, the Free Software Directory was re-implemented as a

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

, using

MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...

and the Semantic MediaWiki extension, to allow users to directly add to and modify its contents. Semantic MediaWiki provides the directory with

semantic web The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

technologies by adding "advanced search and presentation capabilities, structured to be useful for reading by both humans and data-mining programs".The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Re-launches Free Software Directory
TECK.IN, October 3rd, 2011. The new edition of the directory has been described as designed to ease and support with

semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

the discovery and harvesting of information on free software programs. "An extensive and flexible category system, plus over 40,000 keywords and more than 40 different fields of information, enhance both simple and advanced searching". A recent snapshot of the

taxonomy image:Hierarchical clustering diagram.png, 280px, Generalized scheme of taxonomy Taxonomy is a practice and science concerned with classification or categorization. Typically, there are two parts to it: the development of an underlying scheme o ...

of the projects reviewed and accepted in the directory is the following:http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category/All Last visited: 2017 January 29. *accessibility *accounting *addressbooks *addresses *archive *audio *barcodes *barcoding *bitcoin *cad *calculating *calendar *command-line *compressing *console *copying *daemon *database *desktop-enhancement *e-mail *ebooks *ecommerce *editing *education *email *fax *faxing *file-manager *frontend *gameplaying *gnome-app *graphics *hobbies *html *images *interface *internet-application *kde-app *library *live-communications *localization *mathematics *mixing *organizing *pim *playing *printing *productivity *project-management *reading *science *security *software-development *specialized *spreadsheet *sql *stock-market *storage *system-administration *telephony *text *text-creation *timekeeping *timetracker *video *web *web-authoring *window-manager *x-window-system *xml

References

External links

The Free Software Directory
{{Portal bar, Free and open-source software Free Software Foundation UNESCO MediaWiki websites Semantic wikis