Xsnow is a
software application that creates the appearance of
snow falling on the elements of the
graphical user interface of a computer system. Xsnow was originally created as a virtual
greeting card for
Macintosh systems in 1984. In 1993, the concept was ported to the
X Window System as Xsnow, and was included on a number of
Linux distributions in the late 1990s.
Licensing
Even though Xsnow was distributed with earlier versions of Linux, its most recent versions are
shareware
Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
and
Mac OS X ports with added features. The
Unix-based ports for versions <= 1.42 include the source code in order to allow compiling to other platforms, but the software is not considered
free software in the strictest sense.
Version 2.0.1 and higher are
free software.
License
Xsnow version <= 1.42: ''Xsnow is available freely and you may give it to other people as is, but I retain all rights. Therefore it does not classify as 'Public Domain' software. It *is* allowed to package Xsnow for Unix/Linux distributions, CD-Roms etc, and to make the necessary changes to makefiles etc. to facilitate this.''
Versions 2.0.1 and higher use the
GNU General Public Licence version 3.
Variants
* At least one free variant with source code has been published for Windows by Revenger, Inc. This version is snow-only and does not use code from the Xsnow codebase.
* MacPorts has a source code build for Mac OS X that's not the shareware version.
* BSnow, a snow only replicant for BeOS is bundled with
Haiku.
* Let It Snow!
Let It Snow! for Android
/ref> a snow-only variant for Android. This version does not use code from the Xsnow codebase.
See also
* Neko (computer program)
* XBill
* XPenguins
References
External links
*
Original Xsnow homepage
Snow for Windows
iSnow for macOS / OS X
Snow for Macintosh
wsnow for browsers
X Window programs
Desktop widgets
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