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.

Eneru

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Eneru

Website

Source Code

License: MIT License

Description:

Eneru is a Python-based UPS monitoring daemon for NUT that coordinates multi-UPS monitoring, shutdown of VMs, containers, and remote servers, and provides a browser dashboard, authenticated API, Prometheus, MQTT, and Grafana observability.

OpenResto

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OpenResto

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

A self-hosted, zero-dependency restaurant booking system for multiple restaurants. It provides real-time holds, branding, and admin management with a single Docker Compose setup. Web and mobile front-ends, SQLite backend, auto migrations, and multi-arch releases.

Databasus

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Databasus

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0

Description:

Databasus is a free, open-source PostgreSQL backup tool that supports physical and logical backups with Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR), restore verification, and multi-storage destinations (S3, Google Drive, FTP, etc.). It offers scheduling, retention policies, and notifications, and runs self-hosted under the Apache 2.0 license.

GentleOS/32

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GentleOS/32

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-2.0

Description:

GentleOS/32 is a hobby operating system for vintage 32-bit PCs. A monolithic kernel for i386 with minimal hardware: VGA/SVGA, keyboard, mice, and basic serial support. Designed for experimentation and tinkering, it aims for simple, configurable hardware compatibility and a platform for retro-apps.

Workshop

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Workshop

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-3.0

Description:

Workshops are secure, fast, and composable development environments that come agent-ready. Workshop lets you define environments with YAML, enabling reproducible SDK-based setups and workflow-driven development.

OpenJPH

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OpenJPH

Website

Source Code

License: BSD-2-Clause

Description:

OpenJPH is an open-source high-throughput JPEG2000 Part-15 (HTJ2K) codec implementation (C++). It provides a BSD-2-Clause licensed reference for HTJ2K/JPH with Docker, OSS-Fuzz integration, and documentation.

Lyrie.ai

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Lyrie.ai

Website

Source Code

License: MIT License

Description:

Lyrie.ai is an autonomous cybersecurity agent that conducts pentests, red-teams LLM endpoints, scans code and live URLs, and uses the Agent Trust Protocol (ATP) for cryptographic agent identity.