FOSS application

Free and open-source software that an end user installs and runs on a machine they control. The umbrella this spoke is organised under, and the only thing its founding six sources have in common — an Android keyboard, a macOS window manager, a Windows-compatibility runtime, a video downloader, a business-management platform and a directory of the whole category share no market, no user and no technology.

What they share is a posture: the software runs where its operator says, and the operator is the person using it rather than a vendor renting it to them.

Three registers

The corpus divides cleanly, and the divisions matter more than the software categories do.

1. The environment you compute in. anysoftkeyboard, omniwm, termux (cross-wiki). Each replaces something the platform vendor supplies as a default and would prefer you did not replace. All three run on platforms — Android, macOS — that make substitution deliberately awkward, and the awkwardness shapes the software: separate installable language packs, notarized builds, an add-on app per capability.
2. The service you host instead of renting. hometube, ever-gauzy. Here the question is self-hosting and its bill: what the operator takes on when nobody is paid to keep it running. The two sit at opposite ends of that cost — one container against a monorepo with a database, a cache, a search cluster and an object store.
3. The map. openalternative. Software about the category, ranked by stars, and useful mainly as evidence of what the open-source-alternative frame rewards and what it cannot see.

proton-wine-andrevto fits none of the three, which is why it is worth keeping in view: it neither replaces a vendor’s software nor hosts a service. It makes other people’s proprietary software run on hardware it was never built for. Compatibility work is a fourth thing this category does, and the substitution vocabulary has no word for it.

What the corpus does not yet contain

Named honestly, because a spoke of six sources should be explicit about its shape:

• No evidence of use. Stars, forks and commits, and nothing about who runs any of this, at what scale, or how long they stick with it.
• No independent verification of any privacy claim. Two sources here sell a privacy or autonomy property (anysoftkeyboard, hometube) and both are self-reported.
• No failure accounts. Nothing on abandonment, migration back to a hosted product, or what happens to a self-hosted install when its maintainer stops.
• No licensing depth. AGPL-3.0 appears on two sources with completely different intent behind it, and nothing here examines FOSS licensing as a subject.