Welcome Friend!

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Hello Friend and welcome to The Friendly Manual. You know, as in RTFM – ‘Read The Friendly Manual.’ (That’s right, the ‘F’ stands for ‘Friendly.’ Trust me on this, I would never lie to you about something so important.)

This project aims to showcase and promote Free/Libre and Open Source Software. It began life as a forum thread on South Africa’s number one IT website, mybroadband.co.za with community members contributing hundreds of their favourite Free or Open Source applications to a ‘Useful List of Free/Libre/Open Source Software Projects.’

The list has been hosted as a Github Gist but now we have upgraded to a website so we can make the list even more useful and publish richer content such as tutorials and blog articles.

Please check out our Friendly Free Software Directory for a list of Free software that we hope you will find interesting and useful. You can find the original forum thread HERE and the original list HERE.

Thanks for stopping by. Please check back soon for more Free and Open Source software related content.

SurfSense

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SurfSense

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0

Description:

SurfSense is an open-source AI research and knowledge management assistant that connects to external sources (Search Engines, Slack, Jira, Notion, YouTube, GitHub, and more). It enables chat with documents, podcasts, hybrid search, and private LLMs; highly configurable with 100+ LLMs and 6000+ embeddings; self-hostable.

Glass Keep

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Glass Keep

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

Glass Keep is a Keep Notes-style app with a glass UI, built in React + Tailwind, plus a lightweight Express + SQLite backend. It supports multi-user auth, real-time collaboration, Markdown notes, images, tags, and search; designed to run Docker-ready as a self-hosted note-taking solution.

Rybbit

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Rybbit

Website

Source Code

License: AGPL-3.0

Description:

Rybbit is an open-source, privacy-friendly web analytics platform that replaces Google Analytics with cookieless tracking. It offers real-time dashboards, session replay, multi-site management, and customizable analytics with GDPR/CCPA compliance.