is it really FOSS?
Projects About Common Issues

Website purpose, scope & origins

The website aims to achieve the following goals:

  1. Provide software users greater clarity and transparency in the Free and Open Source Software landscape.
  2. Highlight & enable discovery of projects which have a good relationship with Free and Open Source Software.
  3. Provide advice and guidance to projects which can improve their relation to Free and Open Source Software.

We achieve these goals via our process of evaluating projects to assign them a status, while providing some project-specific insight based upon that review.

Scope

This site will look to assess & show a project only if it meets all the following requirements:

  • Currently, or has ever previously, been presented as open source or free software.
  • Has a reasonable following, popularity or visibility (Referenced in published news articles, has over 1k GitHub stars, repeated promotion over time etc…) and there’s marketing content for the project (website, social accounts etc…).
  • It’s considered a “project” or service, rather than a library or sub-part of a project, unless there are FOSS based issues at play.

This scope exists to keep our focus range reasonable instead of documenting every possible existing software project. The second point specifically sets a bar to ensure we’re spending time on projects which are in wider use instead of spending time on new or unused projects.

Origins

This website was developed as a successor to the “Open Source Confusion Cases” project which aimed to communicate with, and document, projects & scenarios of license or “open source” misrepresentation. That project demanded a lot of effort, mainly due to the communication required, while the results were not very practical in regard to utility. Also, that project was focused on cases that generally had a negative impact to FOSS, which could make it feel cynical to work on.

This website was created to solve some of the issues of that project. Here we feature and celebrate FOSS-positive projects in addition to showing issues with the FOSS landscape. For this website, we don’t require prior communication which massively eases ongoing maintenance, although we’re still happy to communicate and advise projects which come to us or use our information as per goal 3 above. Lastly, we aim for this website to be a much more practical resource for those using Free and Open Source Software thanks to being in a more accessible website format while providing important information in a glanceable form.