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.

Clear NDR Community

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Clear NDR Community

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-3.0-or-later

Description:

Clear NDR Community is an open-source Suricata-based network detection and response distribution (NSM/IDS). A turnkey Linux stack (Docker or Debian ISO) incorporating Suricata, OpenSearch, EveBox, Arkime, and Scirius; successor to SELKS. Licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later.

Bigcapital

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Bigcapital

Website

Source Code

License: AGPL-3.0

Description:

Bigcapital is an open-source financial accounting and inventory platform for small to mid-sized businesses, providing double-entry accounting, invoicing, inventory management, multi-currency support, and intelligent reporting for rapid decision-making.

UPX

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UPX

Website

Source Code

License: GNU General Public License v2+ (GPL-2.0+)

Description:

UPX is a free, secure, portable, extendable, high-performance executable packer for Windows, macOS and Linux. It compresses executables and DLLs, typically reducing size by 50-70%, with fast in-place decompression and no runtime penalty. Open-source under the GNU General Public License v2+.

TernFS

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TernFS

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-2.0-or-later (Apache-2.0 with LLVM-exception for protocol definitions and client libraries)

Description:

TernFS is an exabyte-scale, multi-region distributed file system designed for large immutable files, with metadata shards, block services, registry, and multi-client interfaces.

mtoc

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mtoc

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-3.0

Description:

mtoc is a visually rich music player and library browser for Linux, emphasizing smooth, continuous browsing with album artwork front and center. It offers album art carousel, tag-based library management, MPRIS integration, and a responsive Qt/QML interface.

BruteForceAI

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BruteForceAI

Website

Source Code

License: Non-Commercial License

Description:

BruteForceAI is an advanced penetration-testing tool that uses LLMs to analyze login forms and automate multi-threaded brute-force and password-spray attacks, with AI-discovered selectors, evasion features, and webhook notifications for authorized testing.

earlyoom

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earlyoom

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

earlyoom is a lightweight user-space daemon for Linux that monitors memory and swap usage and kills the largest memory consumer when available resources fall below configured thresholds.