Wikipedia

Helpfoss

Joined 31 July 2011

General

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My comparisons/overviews are for active FOSS software only. They serve a specific purpose, namely to give end users and developers an overview over the currently actively developed software available. I am not interested in history or closed source stuff. Thus I will not maintain the currently "allowed" Wikipedia pages regarding software overviews! I believe such overview to be most useful to anybody owning a computer. Yes, it is FOSS only. Commercial developers should have enough money for marketing purposes, FOSS developers usually do not.

I hope my work will eventually find its way to mainline wikipedia, or to a web page specific for this purpose. FSF?

NOTE No1: When I started this, I assumed that the already existent content in the wikipedia articles would actually save me a lot of work. This was a mistake. Reworking the original articles is such a PITA, that I seriously consider porting the content into another format to make this easier and also, because I believe it unlikely, that it will be accepted to mainline.

The current articles main purpose seems to be, to NOT help users searching for software. They are badly written, cluttered, full of useless information and (of course) unmaintained. It seams like somebody wants to rather strew sand in end users eyes, then thoroughly informing users. For example, in the articles for bittorrent clients and browsers there is much clutter and a strong emphasis for some impressive-wannabe usage statistics, so that inexperienced users will likely follow the herd and young software or simply better software be ignored and remain a niche-product.

I believe the structure below to be of a good assistance: (but this is not carved in stone!)

The most used will be to MS Windows and Mac OS-users, since a Linux-users, would probably check their distribution's wiki, or their Package management system for an assortment of programs.

  1. Information for End Users
    1. Release Dates: Logo, First public & Latest stable, Operating Systems: MS Windows, Linux, Mac OS, BSD, Other (e.g. Solaris, embedded Linux, etc.), User Interface: GUI, CLI, WebUI, Other (e.g. TUI)
    2. Features I
    3. Features II
    4. Features III
  2. Information for Developers
    1. License, Libraries and programming/scripting language (regarding the license, we shall distinguish between the versions, because: why GPLv3
  3. Libraries

Already Ported Articles

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general active FOSS
Comparison of BitTorrent clients → BitTorrent
Comparison of web browsers → Web browser
Comparison of email clients → MUA


  1. there are already distribution specific wikis
  2. there is a lot of FOSS software for other OSes as well


No, I do not think, this and similar articles should be deleted, it is simply not what I am looking for since I believe Cross-platform-capability to be an important feature and serve a very important purpose. That is to keep the market for different kinds of operating systems or micro-architectures OPEN. The more software there is, that I can use on the other OS, the more likely that I get along quickly with it, and the more likely that a migration is being considered. This migration does not have to take place from win to linux, it can be from any OS towards any OS! And back. An open market with a lot of options has proven to be a huge plus anytime and anywhere.

Articles to port

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