Free Software Directory reaches 4,000 packages

Published Fri, 2005-06-10 02:58 Software

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced that the FSF's Free Software Directory registered its 4,000th software package.

The category structure has undergone a fourth revision to reflect the increasing depth of free software packages available. Mathematics, formerly part of the Science category, is now on its own, while the Science category itself has deepened considerably: there are now 11 subcategories under Science, including Artificial Intelligence, Meteorology, and Genetics. The size and depth of the Science category reflects free software's popularity in academia.

The variety of real-world applications of free software also increased greatly: there are now enough fax-related, barcoding, and e-commerce software for them to have their own categories. Moreover, you can now run the following businesses with free software: an ISP, an animal shelter, a medical practice, a travel agency, an Internet cafe, a real estate office, an alternative energy company, a pizza parlor, a winery, a library, a bookstore, a search-and-rescue team, and a full service restaurant.

Free software is increasingly being used in creative fields. 'CinePaint' is an image retouching software that has been used in the production of (among others) Harry Potter, Scooby-Doo, and Stuart Little. 'diskWriggler' is a newer package intended as a benchmarking tool in film and post-production.

Individual video and multimedia artists are also using free software, and many of them are writing their own tools. 'LiVes' and 'veejay' are popular free software video editors; 'FreeJ', 'MoB', 'EffecTV', 'PureData', 'piksel', and 'PiDiP' are tools for working with video and creating various effects.

The recognition the Directory has received has also increased. It was profiled on lwn.net on August 25, 2004 [http://lwn.net/Articles/97521/]. At the FSF's first annual members' meeting, in March 2003, Richard Stallman, President of the FSF, named the Directory as his first choice of the two most important projects the FSF had undertaken in the past five years. Almost 90% of the packages in the Directory are licensed under the FSF's own GPL or LGPL licenses.

The continuously rising number of packages in the Directory is proof that usable, productive free software exists for a variety of business, personal, and artistic contexts and can be found at http://directory.fsf.org/.

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