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.

OpenBGPD

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OpenBGPD

Website

Source Code

License: BSD license

Description:

OpenBGPD is a free, open-source BGP-4 implementation that lets ordinary machines act as routers, exchanging routes with other BGP peers. Part of the OpenBSD project, it includes a portable tarball version and BSD licensing.

Hatchet

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Hatchet

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

Hatchet is an open-source platform for running background tasks and durable workflows on PostgreSQL, including a durable queue, observability, alerting, a real-time dashboard, and CLI for DAGs, scheduling, concurrency, and event-driven execution.

LilyPond

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LilyPond

Website

Source Code

License: GNU General Public License v3

Description:

LilyPond is a free, cross‑platform music-engraving program that turns text input into beautifully typeset scores, aiming for the look of hand‑engraved classical music; it emphasizes explicit, human‑readable input and scriptable extensibility.

AERIS-10

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AERIS-10 Open Source Pulse Linear Frequency Modulated Phased Array Radar

Website

Source Code

License: MIT License

Description:

Open-source, low-cost 10.5 GHz PLFM phased array radar (AERIS-10). Provides hardware schematics, firmware, and a Python GUI with documentation for beamforming, Doppler processing, and target tracking—designed as a modular, hackable radar platform.