Free Software Foundation Collections
The Free Software Foundation Directory of open source projects lists those that run under "free" systems, particularly GNU and GNU/Linux variants.
Every month we collect the available project-level metadata from the Free Software Foundation's directory, and load that into our database. We then parse through those html pages and extract interesting data elements. After parsing, we save each piece of data in our database also. We then provide this data back to researchers to do with as you wish.
Project Items:
- Developers on each project (includes maintainers, developers, and contributors)
- Project registration date
- Project description (textual)
- Project interface(s)
- Project language(s) (programming language)
- Project license(s)
- Project names and a unique number
- Project URLs (both FSF URL and 'real' URL)
Frequently Asked Questions:
- What is the difference between this FSF directory and Savannah?
Savannah is a code repository for free software, and includes development tools and all the things you might find in a code forge. Conversely, the FSF directory is just that, a directory of projects. We have collections from both of these forges. - Why is there data missing for FSF?
We were unable to collect from FSF for a large part of 2007 and 2008 because they were redesigning their site and it made it difficult to get the complete list of projects. Starting with data source id 142 in August 2008, we were able to begin collecting again. Another redesign happened in 2010-2011 timeframe, so we deprecated some columns and added others.
Data Resources: