... Free Open Source Software mainly for Internet, Engineering and Science ...
About the "Fossies" archive
The "Fossies" software archive is probably the first web-based software archive on the world (founded in 1994 under the previous name "Fresh")
and hopefully still one of the leading non-commercial FOSS platforms.
Originally developed especially for users of the DLR (the German Aerospace Center)
it became later a general "semi-official" service of the T-Systems SfR
and is since 2011 maintained privately on an honorary basis.
So enjoy the charm of the web design of the last century combined with the freshest special browsing features of today and detect the powerful Free Open Source Software (FOSS) treasures within this archive that are collected mainly with the focus on Internet, Engineering and Science applications ... we named that gems just "Fossies" ;-)
It's be in the nature of research that often very specialized solutions are required. But it's be also in the nature of research that many basic activities are common: data analysis, visualization, publication, communication and also everyday works like intelligent extracting and conversion of information or just comfortable maintenance and monitoring of workstations or servers. In that fields closed commercial software and FOSS software compete and complement each other. For many of the described tasks researchers and scientists can find excellent solutions within
FREeware, SHareware (="Fresh") open source software packages.
You may see also the terms
and inform you about the different available licenses e.g. via
A detailed list with further information about Open Source Software can be found e.g. in the How-To-Contribute-To-Open-Source guide.
Here are some of the special features that the "Fossies" software archive offers you:
- View the list of package members in different sort orders or fashions. Standard is a reduced and contents-dependent arranged list containing mainly the information- and documentation-related files.
- Browse the member files of the packages to study both the documentation and the source code.
- View source code files with syntax highlighting, prefixed line numbers (if meaningful) and optional code folding.
- View some markup language source files that are normally hardly readable for users, such as HTML, Texinfo, POD and Markdown files or Unix manual pages, in a "user-friendly" way after they have been specifically pre-formatted by Fossies.
- Study the Doxygen-generated source code documentation (cross-referenced to the code), especially useful for software authors and developers.
- Study the changes of source code and documentation between the current and the preceding version of a software package.
- Search for patterns in the documentation files of all the packages within a folder with direct links to the matching files or lines (optionally in different approximative search modes).
- Search for files resp. member filenames contained in the software packages (only one click to browse them).
- Enjoy the so-called CLOC ("Count Lines of Code") statistics generated for all source code packages.
- Study the source code spell check report for your project, which allows to inspect the context of the misspelled words in a fast and comfortable way.
- Use alternative archiving (zip, tar) or compression formats with higher compression rates (for e.g. xz) to save bandwidth and reduce download times.
- The server fossies.org ensures the protection of the exchanged information and data by using only the HTTPS protocol (complemented by the HSTS policy).
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Last but not least the software collection is done independently, the offered software packages are
checked
by multiple virus/malware scan engines (via VirusTotal) and the Fossies server itself and intentionally also the offered software are completely ad- respectively adware-free.
The term "Fresh" (the previous archive name derived from "FREeware SHareware") is also seen as a kind of mission, so various proprietary control techniques have been developed to "guarantee" that users always find the freshest software versions in the "Fossies" archive.
For this reason, this term ("Fresh") is retained as a quality goal and as a reminiscence of the old server name in the historical Fossies favicon: 
.
And last but not least: Please use the "Fossies" server in a fair manner.
Simultaneous multiple downloads of the same file, for example by download managers, are undesirable.
All legitimate manual access by real users is of course permitted and, for example, mirroring the Doxygen documentation of one or more FOSS projects is also permitted.
Search engines that make their results publicly available are welcome.
However, in order to ensure the best possible server performance and bandwidth for "normal" users, mirroring, regular automated access and use by AI bots and scrapers (if without benefit to "Fossies" or the FOSS projects it supports) are generally prohibited.
Since such abuse has increased significantly recently, unwanted direct access to fossies.org has been blocked since June 20, 2025!
"Normal" users, who may unfortunately also be affected under certain circumstances, can circumvent this protective measure by starting their browser session on fossies.org on the homepage or one of the main folder pages. However, it is much more convenient to whitelist the IP address used for a longer period of time, which can be achieved simply by solving a trivial challenge on the associated blocking information page.
special_ai_info.html