foss alternatives

in the time of mass surveillance and data scraping at almost any point of the internet, foss software is essential and could bring this all down. foss is short for free and open source software. you can share, modify, and distribute foss software freely and use it in your projects yourself.

in my case, i just like to use applications that don't phone home for sending some telemetry data. also i like to use software where i can read the privacy policy in 10 minutes or less. thus i am really engaged in foss software.

also i really love the fact that i can modify and patch the software. this usually means that the patch will somewhen be upstreamed. this makes the software better for everybody using it.

also you can check the current status for an issue or feature. this makes the development process very transparent, which i really like. however this should be a list of foss alternatives that you might enjoy to use. please note that those might not follow the open source definition, however they have their source code freely available and are not only source-available.

onlyoffice

onlyoffice is an office suite that you either can choose to selfhost or to download the desktop app. it is produced by a latvian software company called ascensio systems sia. the company also sells an proprietary enterprise edition and this is how they generate revenue. however the community edition is open source.

the suite consists of a ducument- and spreadsheeteditor, an app to create presentations and a pdf reader. it also natively support .docx, .xlsx, .pptx and more. this makes the switch between microslop's office suite to onlyoffice very easy.

sourcehut

sourcehut is a very minimalistic source forge. for example, instead of pull-requests, sourcehut has mailing lists. instead of a complex canban board there is a feature tracker. if you want to use all of sourcehut, you might want to pay for their subscirption. this is 2$/m or 20$/y. with this you get unlimited ci builds and much more.

sourcehut is probably the best source forge i've ever used, being stable and very transparent to it's users. all the code for sourcehut is availible freely. if you want to, you can just host your own server if you dont want to pay for the service.

comaps

comaps is an alternative to google maps or apple maps. you can download the app on both ios and android. you can download map sections without the need to pay anything.

the map data is taken from open street map and is usually very accurate. it has a bit of a learning curve, however after you get your way around, you probably start enjoying it more than google maps/apple maps.

i especially like that i can import and export my bookmarks/tracks into the gpx format. this means that i can plan a hiking track on my phone and then export the track onto my gps without the need for any third party service like google.

honorable mention

another honorable mention for a service, that is not open source is are.na. it often times is presented as a pinteres alternative, however i use it as much more.

you can copy and paste links into arena and it creates a screenshot of the website. you then can add those screenshots to so named channels. those are just collections of images, similar to a pin on pinterest. however you not only can add links and images but pdf's too. i got a channel for all the scientific papers, that i want to read and want to store somewhere.