[Fsf-friends] About the Free Software Directory

[Frederick Noronha (FN)]

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/directory/entry-20050212.html

One of our most important projects is the Free Software Directory.

by Janet Casey

To make a donation supporting the Free Software Directory and other FSF 
projects, please visit donate.fsf.org.

The Free Software Directory is a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) 
and the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization 
(UNESCO). It catalogs useful free software that runs under free operating 
systems, particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants.

The Directory maintainer verifies the license for every package in the 
directory by opening each package and checking the license of each source code 
file. Almost 90% of the packages included are under the GPL or LGPL, but any 
package under a license we consider acceptably free (see this list), that runs 
on a free OS, and that does not depend on non-free software can be included.

The Directory has grown enormously since its inception in late 1999. It now has 
almost 3,300 packages, each one individually checked as described above. The 
scope of the Directory has also broadened: the original template for a 
Directory entry had 30 possible fields; the current template has 47. Licensing 
issues with Qt and PHP4 have been resolved, so packages that use Qt or are 
written in PHP4 are now included. Originally, almost all packages had command 
line interfaces; now Web-based and GUI packages account for roughly a third of 
the Directory.

The Directory accounts for between 40 and 45% of the traffic on the FSF's Web 
site; in a recent five day period, it had almost 2.5 million total hits.

THE DIRECTORY IS AT: http://directory.fsf.org/


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Frederick Noronha (FN)                    Nr Convent Saligao 403511 GoaIndia
Freelance Journalist                      P: 832-2409490 M: 9822122436
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