... Fresh Open Source Software mainly for Internet, Engineering and Science ...
About the "Fossies" archive
History
The "Fossies" software archive is probably the first web-based software archive on the world - founded in 1994 under the previous name "Fresh".
Originally developed especially for users of the DLR (the German Aerospace Center)
it became later a general "semi-official" service of the T-Systems SfR
and is since 2011 maintained privately on an honorary basis.
So enjoy the charm of the web design of the last century combined with the freshest special browsing features of today and detect the powerful Free Open Source Software (FOSS) treasures within this archive that are collected mainly with the focus on Internet, Engineering and Science applications ... we named that gems just "Fossies" ;-)
Motivation
It's be in the nature of research that often very specialized solutions are required. But it's be also in the nature of research that many basic activities are common: data analysis, visualization, publication, communication and also everyday works like intelligent extracting and conversion of information or just comfortable maintenance and monitoring of workstations or servers. In that fields closed commercial software and FOSS software compete and complement each other. For many of the described tasks researchers and scientists can find excellent solutions within
FREeware, SHareware (=Fresh) open source software packages.
You may see also the terms
"Open Source"
as defined by the OSI (Open Source Initiative) and
"Free Software"
as defined by the FSF (Free Software Foundation).
Features
Here are some of the special features that the "Fossies" software archive offers you:
View the archive member list in different sort orders or fashions. Standard is a reduced and contents-dependent arranged list containing mainly the information- and documentation-related files.
Browse the member files of the archives in order to study both the documentation as the sources.
View source code files with syntax highlighting and prefixed line numbers (if meaningful).
View some normally "user-unreadable" markup language source files like HTML, Texinfo, and POD files or Unix manual pages in a "user-friendly" manner by source-language specific preformatting.
Study the Doxygen generated source code documentation (cross-referenced to the code), especially useful for software authors and developers.
Search for patterns in the documentation files of all the archives within a software collection with direct links to the matching files or lines (optionally in different approximative search modes).
Enjoy the so-called CLOC statistics ("Count Lines of Code") generated for all source code packages.
Use alternate archiving (zip, tar) or compression formats with higher compression rates (bz2 and especially xz) for saving bandwidth and reducing download times.
The term "Fresh" (derived from "FREeware SHareware") is also regarded as a kind of mission so different own control techniques were developed to "guarantee" that users will find always the freshest software releases within the "Fossies" archive.