Log — FOSS Applications Wiki

Append-only history. Entries start with ## [YYYY-MM-DD] <op> | <title>.

[2026-08-09] split | Spun out of the hub _inbox — six sources, five tags, nine weeks

The curator asked for a scan of the holding pen (“scan the inbox for clusters”), then approved this spin-out as a single spoke (“A and d”). The cluster was not visible in the records’ own cluster: tags — the seven candidates were filed under five different tentative tags (local-first-foss-tools ×2, self-hosted-homelab, open-source-alternatives ×2, linux-desktop, windows-game-compat), so no tag ever reached the ≥3 trigger. Regrouping by actual subject made it the largest cluster in the inbox by a distance. Every record carried the same park reason in different words: no spoke owns software an end user runs themselves.

Founding corpus: six sources, all T1 primary repositories.

Concepts written: foss-application (umbrella), self-hosting, open-source-alternative. Entity: f-droid, paged because it recurs across two sources. Valve, Menny Even-Danan, yt-dlp and FFmpeg deferred at one mention each, per ../ENTITIES.md.

The seventh source did not come. termux was in the cluster and is already paged in ../osint-wiki as an OSINT enabler. Per the one-canonical-node rule it is linked cross-wiki as a bridge node and not duplicated here; that spoke’s page was refreshed the same day with the repository’s own numbers instead. The cluster is six, not seven, and it clears the trigger anyway.

A source contradicted the record that routed it. omniwm‘s park record — built from a showcase post on an aggregator site, with a broken canonical URL (https://github.com/ # OmniWM) — describes a C and Lua tiling manager for X11 with under 100 stars. The repository that same showcase names is Swift, macOS-only, GPL-2.0, 2.4k stars. The repository is what this spoke describes; both claims are on the page, and the aggregator is recorded as unreliable for this subject. Seven weeks of carrying a park record nobody re-checked against its primary source.

Thesis at spin-out (see synthesis): the six agree on the posture — the operator is in control — and disagree completely on its price. The finding that survives all six is that self-hosting relocates a dependency and is sold as deleting one, with hometube stating both halves in its own README. The second is that the category’s own map (openalternative, star-ranked) cannot see compatibility work at all.

[2026-08-10] ingest | best-of — a directory of 22 generated, quality-scored open-source lists

Routed here by the hub (runner-up: engineering-education-wiki, which owns awesome-lists as curricula — this one teaches nothing, it ranks; dev-tooling-wiki declined for the generator alone under the standing Ky precedent). Source: https://github.com/best-of-lists/best-of, T1, CC0-1.0, 1,837★/150 forks read 2026-08-10.

Pages: best-of-lists (source summary), project-quality-score (the metric), best-of-generator (the tool, thin node). openalternative gained a cross-link; synthesis gained a second half to its “the category’s own map cannot see part of itself” section.

Why it earned three pages rather than one. The spoke’s third finding rested on a single directory’s ranking method — openalternative sorts by stars alone — and had no counter-example. This is the counter-example: the same genre, ranking by a score that gives one point each for a licence, semver, a release inside six months, a commit inside three, and adds stars as round(log(n)/2) − 1 among a dozen logarithmic terms. Read from the generator’s source, not its marketing.

What it does not fix. Both maps rank repository metadata. Neither reads code, runs the software, or counts users — and the one usage term the score does have, monthly downloads, is unearnable by software that ships as an application rather than a package. The generator’s docs concede it outright: “There is no scientific proof that this really reflects the quality of a project.”

Finding from the source’s own markers. 17 of the 22 indexed lists carry 💤 (six months idle) or 💀 (twelve months idle). The apparatus built to detect abandonment is mostly documenting its own — a generated list keeps rebuilding after the curator stops choosing what goes in it.

Entities: Benjamin Räthlein, Lukas Masuch, Jan Kalkan and Johannes Rieke named once each as best-of-generator maintainers; deferred per ../ENTITIES.md, as Valve and Menny Even-Danan were.

[2026-08-10] ingest | OpenPanel — AGPL analytics that calls itself the open-source Mixpanel

Routed here by the hub (runner-up: analytical-databases-wiki, which owns the ClickHouse question and already holds posthog-duckdb-vs-clickhouse — the same product category making the same engine choice; search-marketing-wiki was the second runner-up on the measurement angle). Source: https://github.com/Openpanel-dev/openpanel, T1, AGPL-3.0, 6,449★/418 forks/77 open issues, read 2026-08-10.

Pages: openpanel (source summary). self-hosting and open-source-alternative both updated; synthesis gained a third finding and a sixth open question.

The finding. Analytics inverts the direction every privacy claim in this corpus had pointed. Until now the beneficiary of self-hosting was the operator (anysoftkeyboard cannot leak what it never sends). Here the people recorded are the site’s visitors, and moving the software in-house does not reduce the recording — it removes the vendor policy, the audit and the data-processing agreement that stood between them and the data. Relocation, again, but this time the risk lands on someone who never made the decision.

Two secondary gains. Second AGPL-3.0 project here selling its own hosted version after ever-gauzy, so open question 5 has a pattern. And its docs state the recurring maintenance outright — updates mean reading the changelog and applying changes to your instance — which is the first direct evidence for open question 2.

On the imitation hypothesis. This is the only source that applies the open-source-alternative label to itself, in its own GitHub description, and its feature list is Mixpanel’s. Recorded as one ambiguous instance, not as a confirmation — those features are also what anyone shopping for analytics asks for, and nothing separates the causes.

Read from the repository, not the marketing. The seven-container stack comes from self-hosting/docker-compose.template.yml; the docs page describes the stack loosely and never enumerates it.