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, alexandrie. 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.

And one project sits in three registers at once. calibre manages a library on your own machine, ships a content server that hosts it (register 2), and began life as a reverse-engineered device protocol with a format converter bolted on (the compatibility-layer register). It is also the oldest thing here by fourteen years — started 2006 — and the registers were never separate for it. That is a caution about the taxonomy rather than a fault in it: the divisions describe what a project does, and a project that lasts long enough does several.

A second project sits outside the three, for a different reason. ceefax-station rebuilds a teletext service nobody needs, over amateur radio, for the pleasure of it. It replaces no vendor default and hosts no service anyone would otherwise rent — which makes it the first source here whose motive is hobby with no utility argument attached, the motive the 2025 survey found outranking both privacy and cost. The taxonomy is built from what software does for its operator, and this one is done for its own sake.

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. (Two dents since: self-host-user-survey-2025 counts 4,081 respondents, and calibre claims 3 million active installs — the first install figure here, self-reported and undated.)
• 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.