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.

SolidCraft

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SolidCraft

Website

Source Code

License: MIT or Apache-2.0 (dual license)

Description:

SolidCraft is an open-source parametric 3D CAD application built in Rust. It supports desktop, web, and CLI workflows with MCP integration for AI clients. The project provides official downloads, tutorials, and configuration guidance to get started.

IngeTrazo

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IngeTrazo · Open-source 3D modeler for architecture and engineering

Website

Source Code

License: GPL-3.0

Description:

Open-source 3D modeler for architecture and engineering with BIM layers, offline operation, and AI-assisted drafting; exports to PDF, DXF, OBJ and more.

Open Code Review

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Open Code Review

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0

Description:

Open Code Review is an AI-powered code review CLI tool that reads Git diffs, delegates analysis to LLM agents with a tool-enabled workflow, and produces precise, line-level feedback. It blends deterministic pipelines with AI to enable scalable, thorough code reviews across languages.

FreeLLMAPI

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FreeLLMAPI

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

FreeLLMAPI is a local router and MCP server that aggregates 34 free LLM providers behind a single OpenAI-compatible /v1 endpoint. It offers 7.4B tokens/month across 474 model families and 635 endpoints, automatically routing requests, refreshing catalogs, and encrypting keys while remaining compatible with OpenAI-like clients.

Rose

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Rose

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

Rose is an open-source automatic skin changer for League of Legends. It runs in the system tray, detects champion skin selections, and injects the chosen skin at game start using Pengu Loader, with modular JavaScript plugins for UI, internationalization, and party/sharing features.

Submarine

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Submarine

Website

Source Code

License: MIT

Description:

Submarine is a fast, free, open-source SSH and SFTP client for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. One window per server with terminal, SFTP, port forwarding, and folder mirror; end-to-end encrypted profile sync. Built with Rust + Tauri; MIT licensed.

VoxCPM2

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VoxCPM2

Website

Source Code

License: Apache-2.0

Description:

VoxCPM2 is an open-source tokenizer-free Text-to-Speech system enabling multilingual speech synthesis, voice design, and controllable voice cloning. Built on a diffusion autoregressive architecture, it delivers 48kHz studio-grade audio across 30 languages, with training, fine-tuning (SFT/LoRA), and production deployment options.