What is it?
Supported Projects
Downloads
F/OSS- what is it?
F/OSS stands for Free/Open Source Software, and it means software that the whole world owns.
It is free of charge, having been developed in collaboration between dozens of teams of computer scientists, programmers, and engineers from around the globe.
It is free to use, having been licensed under terms allowing its use, modification, and redistribution without cost or condition.
Lastly, it is truly open, its source code open to auditing, review, and alteration by security experts and developers alike.
F/OSS represents much of the best software in the world, leading the field in capability, reliability, and low cost, and empowering its users by giving them the ability to tailor any program to meet their needs.
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Supported Projects
In our work both inside and outside the community, we have found that while there are millions of successful F/OSS projects in the world, there are a small number whose quality, commitment to the ideals of F/OSS, and vivacity deserve commendation above all others. If you believe that your project deserves a spot on this list, email us and tell us why.
Top Projects:
- Linux
The core of the most popular F/OSS operating system in the world, Linux has led the way for hundreds of thousands of other projects, and has become widely recognized as being among the most powerful and flexible pieces of software ever developed. It has currently been ported to 23 architectures, runs on 426 of the world's top 500 supercomputers, is the leading operating system in the embedded development field, and has in recent years brought its legendary capability and performance to the mainstream desktop.
The kernel itself is available at kernel.org, but most people wanting to download and install Linux will need more than just a kernel. Such complete system distributions (distros, for short) include Gentoo, RedHat, and, our personal recommendation, Ubuntu. - OpenSSH
In a phrase, OpenSSH puts the power of any machine you own at your fingertips. Sharing files, hardware, and applications has never been so easy. Developed with security in mind, OpenSSH has become the go-to tool for any serious systems administrator. It can be downloaded at OpenSSH.Com. Windows users should look at PuTTY, a F/OSS SSH client. - Firefox
The FireFox web browser is among the most popular and best known pieces of F/OSS available, being more secure, more standards compliant, and having better performance than Internet Explorer, while being more fully-featured than Opera or Konqueror. We recommend it as a replacement for all existing Internet Explorer installations, and as the default browser on most Linux machines. Firefox can be downloaded here. - Apache
Apache is the world's leading web server. Flexible, reliable, and secure, it forms a cornerstone of the LAMP stack and is among the best options available for anyone who hosts their own website or web services.
Apache is available from apache.org. - OpenOffice
Designed by Sun Microsystems to provide a free alternative to Microsoft Office, it quickly became open source and has since become the largest of the free office suites. It has the capability to read, write, and modify any document produced by Microsoft Office or Works, and to save documents as PDFs. In addition, it can utilise more powerful backends for database management (ala Access) including the enterprise-grade MySQL and PostgreSQL. We recommend OpenOffice as a replacement for Microsoft Office wherever possible. It is available from OpenOffice.Org.
If you are interested in reading more about F/OSS or are ready to try installing a few of the applications mentioned above, more links and information can be found at our downloads page.
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