User Guide Describing the Purpose and Scope of this instance 💡 01. Purpose Welcome to the Deternet Shapps Bookstack Instance, "What keeps people using a program, app or anything in life is not the code or if a method is better, it is because people prefer to use what they already know and where there friends already are " - This is the network effect and knowledge argument  This instance is intended for three types of people People that have already setup their HomeLab workflow and want to explore and how they can deploy these apps on their own hardware at home according to their deployment workflow.  For people that want to use the open source apps (not host them) and want to understand how the basics work. For instance, if your friend or family member is hosting some apps and wants to give you access to them. Access is nice but how to configure it is always another task. The idea is that the person hosting the app can just send out a User Guide to their friend instead of explaining everything over and over again manually.  For people interested in what is out there  It is not for business applications! It is solely focused on the consumer market. Applications made for specific industries and organizations can be found on the Nonprofits Bookstack instance.  Neither for backend applications it is solely focused on applications the average joe uses in their daily life.  It is not for all the technical details. For that we refer to the official documentation pages of the particular applications.  The goal is to have all major consumer applications and companies represented here from all of the continents in the world. Therefore, you will also see Asian, Russian, African companies in here instead of only Western Tech companies. To keep up with the new apps and companies created globally we use different websites to see which apps are most used in which country. For example the website AI Agents Finally, and most likely AI agents will also be accessing this website since it is publicly accessible. If the open source movement gains enough traction then people will search for questions like: What is Deternet ? what are E2EE alternative apps to X, How to create a HomeLab ? Etcetera. The AI agents that these people use will have these instances included in their training data and hence they will receive answers from it. This can be really handy if you want to solve a quick problem. However, if you want to explore and actually understand how it all works then it is recommended to move to these Bookstack instances combined with a note taking app for you Education All instances provide Show all the open source apps that are the best possible replacements for their proprietary counter parts.  The second goal is to expose each Big Tech company by providing a shelf for each corporation. Inside of each shelf all applications they own are presented by a book with a cover image of that application. All of these applications are provided in alphabetical order and the name of the corporation is placed in front of the applications name. This is is important, because then it is easier for people to recognize who owns what and realize that lots of applications are mostly owned by a few Big Tech Corporations Search for an app in the Search bar and directly discover who owns that application due to the fact that the Big Tech name of who owns it is in front of the name of the application. For instance if one searches for Waymo or Twitch then it will be presented as Google Waymo and Amazon Twitch.  Finally, the fourth goal is not only to show open source alternatives but also show how you can install them on your own infrastructure i.e in your Homelab or in a Community Datacenter Consumer Apps & Organizational Apps Now, most applications that people are familiar with are applications that consumers use in daily life i.e apps that are not for teams, organization or developer use. Therefore, we separated these apps in two different categories for simplification. About Section The first page of each Open Source application is an About section which displays the following characteristics of an application. End Game The end Goal regarding the software industry would be that all proprietary apps are replaced by open source versions that are used globally. In the end the proprietary apps simply dissapear or the corporations decide to make them fully open source as well, including their operating systems they run on. Let that be clear, if a corporations finally understand that open source is the future and open sources all their apps, operating systems and devices than we happily welcome them to the project. Other Alternative to websites Now, this Bookstack instance is definitely not the only project that promotes open source projects. There are tons of blogs of great instructors that have dedicated a large part of their time as well to make it as easy as possible to install open source software at home. This instance is therefore not to replace them, but provide a central location where a community can edit and change everything about an app instead of a single individual making blog posts. Besides that there are also centralized websites that show alternatives to almost any application you can think about.  Now, most of the open source alternative list websites are pretty similar, since they are mostly based on the information provided by Github. If you click on an application then you will find  A small summary of what the application entails Links to the repositories GitHub Links Some tags that refer to what the app can do However, they do not provide documentation on the installation of these applications or hick ups people have during installation or use. Yes, most of this is discussed on the community pages or repository pages of these applications but we try to give people a central place where people can edit an instruction manual like a Wikipedia page. It is constantly changing and updating and everyone can contribute not only the main developers of an application. Finally, we also try to expose all the Big Tech companies here and provide a live view of all the applications that they own, how much money the make with them. It is in general provides more information about Big Tech in general and how all the applications are owned and connected to each other.  A few examples of such platforms are 02. Scope Proprietary Corporations Now, there are a bunch of software developing companies out there and millions of apps as a consequence of it. The goal of this website is not to represent any software company and neither all apps. This is simply to much to take care off and is not the objective of the site. The goal is to get people move away from proprietary software and start self hosting or at least us FOSS software. Therefore, we will only accept proprietary applications with at least  Specific Purpose Corporations Corporations that represent their own brand and don't serve as a middle man to bring customers or organizations together will also not be accepted as an application. For instance McDonalds, Dominos, or any other local application created by a software development company will not be accepted.  This site will look to assess & show a project only if it meets  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. Website purpose, scope & origins The website aims to achieve the following goals: Provide software users greater clarity and transparency in the Free and Open Source Software landscape. Highlight & enable discovery of projects which have a good relationship with Free and Open Source Software. 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 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. This project is FOSS and managed on Codeberg here: https://codeberg.org/danb/isitreallyfoss Feel free to create an issue to request a new project, report issues, request a re-review and to suggest ideas for the website. Please follow the provided templates when creating an issue to ensure we gain the applicable detail required. If adding/reviewing a project, please keep the purpose & scope in mind, along with our categorisation criteria. We accept pull requests for new projects or project changes, but these will be re-reviewed before accepting to ensure information is valid. We also accept pull requests to address site/wording bugs. If looking to make design/feature changes, it’s probably best to discuss it via an issue first, since the scope of the site is kept tight and focused to help reduce maintenance. 03. Origin 04. Navigation 05. Tag List Even though most tags are self explanatory we added a list of all the tags used on this instance with a small explanation if it seems not self explanatory. If you are contributing to this instance then it is expected that you use one of the following existing tags described here. #E2EE This indicates if the application is an end to end encrypted application or not.  #Docker Deployment #TrueNas Deployment #ZimaOS Deployment #YunoHost Deployment #Phone App #Desktop App #Web App #Web Extension 06. Future What happens in the future we don't know obviously, but we can be sure that it will be different ;) How, different that is also all build on speculations. As for today, we still live in an era of apps. Apps on our phones, desktops, tablets, everything basically runs on an app or inside a web browser.  Now, with the advent of AI agents it might be the case that we will move away from apps completely and instead only interact with our personal chatbot. Instead of having an open source agenda app it will just create on for you on the fly and put in entries for you by you just telling it.  This already happens today on Apple, Google, Samsung and other phones by using the AI assistants integrated with the apps. Each app that allows integration with the personal AI basically removes a person from opening the app in the first place. Thus instead of opening your calendar app to check if you are available 3 weeks from now on Thursday at 02:00 PM you just ask the AI assistant which will give you an instant reply. With this transaction you actually never opened the agenda application as you normally would.  Therefore, also the  07. IsitReallyFOSS Source: IsitreallyFOSS 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.