FreeCompetitors/faq.html

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<h1>Frequently Asked Questions:</h1>

<details>
  <summary>What is it for?</summary>
  <span><p>

      Free Competitors is a website where you can find Free Software which can replace otherwise Non-Free Software that you may be using. And it's good to find other Free Software.
      
  </p></span>
</details>


<details>
  <summary>What is Free Software?</summary>
  <span><p>

      Free Software is software that respects user's Freedom and Community. In order to do this, Free Software is released with it's source code published. And it comes with a copyright license granting the users with the following four essential freedoms:
      <br><br> 0. To run the software as you wish and for whatever purpose.
      <br> 1. To study how the software works and make modifications to it.
      <br> 2. To give or sell copies of the software to other people.
      <br> 3. To give or sell your own modified copies of the software to other people.
      <br><br>

      Free Software is not a matter of price. Nor, technically speaking, a matter of security or privacy. <b>It's a matter of Freedom</b>. But because of the four essential freedoms it tends to be gratis and very secure. Freedoms 2 and 3 insure that if one enmities price is not suitable for you, you could still ask somebody else for a legal gratis copy. And freedom 1 insures that in Free Software will not hide any malicious features designed by the programmers.

      More about Free Software you can learn on <a href="https://gnu.org">GNU.ORG</a>
      
  </p></span>
</details>

<details>
  <summary>What is Non-Free Software?</summary>
  <span><p>

      Non-Free Software, or Proprietary Software is any software that denies users their freedoms and divides users by not respecting their community. It could range from commercial software developed by big companies, to small, often gratis apps, which does not give the user the four essential freedoms <i>(see: What is Free Software?)</i><br><br>
      Non-Free Software often does not have it's source published. Some of them do, just with a very strict license, denying one or all of the four essential freedoms. Because most of Non-Free Software's source code is hidden from the users, developers can inject the software with malicious features, specifically designed to harm the users for the soul benefit of the developer. See a detailed list of such malicious functionalities on <a href="https://gnu.org/malware">GNU.ORG/MALWARE</a>
      
  </p></span>
</details>

<details>
  <summary>Is this website Free Software?</summary>
  <span><p>

      This website is not software. It's a website. What you are seeing is a web-page containing no software at all. But, the server that's powering the website is Free Software. It's under the <a href="https://notabug.org/jyamihud/FreeCompetitors/src/master/LICENSE">GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE version 3</a>, or at your choosing any later version as published by the Free Software Foundation. The license is specifically designed for web-servers. Anyone can open a copy of this website, but there will be a requirement, by the license, to make it's corresponding source code available to the user.<br><br>

      The corresponding source code of this website is available at the end of the page.
      
  </p></span>
</details>

<details>
  <summary>What is JavaScript?</summary>
  <span><p>

      JavaScript is a programming language most used to add additional functionality to web-pages. This website does not use any JavaScript, but most modern websites do. A lot of them are even built entirely in JavaScript. Which makes them Software and not merely web-sites. So we list them on this website.
      
  </p></span>
</details>

<details>
  <summary>Does this website uses JavaScript?</summary>
  <span><p>

      No. We do not use a single line of JavaScript. Now, you are probably wondering how we make so many cool things with the website. Like progress bars and graphs? Well, we are using CSS for it. And CSS is really all you need to render pretty websites. JavaScript is really unnecessary. You can right-click and see sources of the pages. They have comments.
      
  </p></span>
</details>

<details>
  <summary>Does this website uses cookies or other trackers?</summary>
  <span><p>

      We do not use cookies. We respect the privacy of every person. Furthermore this website is designed to work over Tor. If you are connecting via .onion domain, we do not even see what Tor node is connecting. For the server, it seems like it's connecting to itself. So, if you using .onion site,  we don't have anyway to even tell whether you connected to it before. Or how many times you connected to it. At a non .onion instance, your IP address will be visible to the website operator. The software is not configured to record them. But you have to trust the website operator. So we are advising to still use .onion version, or simply connect over Tor or VPN ( to anything ).</p>

    <p>We do however see what is being searched. What pages are requested to be served and how often they are requested. For example, if you are requesting to see the Free Competitors for let's say <a href="/whatsapp">WhatsApp</a> it will request the server to render and send back the WhatsApp page. We can see when the server does it and what page is requested.</p>

    <p>This fact lets us generate truly anonymous analytics. For example, we can detect what software is being searched, but not yet added into our database. So to create a list for us on what to work on.</p>

    <p>One more thing that we can use it for. Is to get a <a href="/stats">general usage analytics</a>. Without counties and people's names. Just the amounts and times people used the site. For example, each time you load the web-site for the first time ( on each session of your browser ) it will request the favicon. A little logo to put in the corner of the tab. It does it only once per session ( usually ). So we can record the times when the favicon was requested to get a general idea of how many users use the site. Without knowing who they are, or anything about them.
      
  </p></span>
</details>

<details>
  <summary>How does it find Competitors?</summary>
  <span><p>

      Each software is listed as a database file listing their various features and anti-features. Comparing them to find matches, we can find software with similar functionality. For example: WhatsApp is a messenger, so is GNU Jami. Both will have the word "Messenger" written in their features databases. Some include more common features then the others. Thus we can sort them and give each one a suggestion score. Some software have more anti-features than others, which we use to influence the suggestion score too.
      
  </p></span>
</details>

<details>
  <summary>I spotted a piece of software that is missing. What should I do?</summary>
  <span><p>

      We need to list each software manually to make it appear on the database. So if you find a piece of software that is missing in our catalogue, don't hesitate to tell it to us. <a href="https://notabug.org/jyamihud/FreeCompetitors/issues/25">We have a special comment thread dedicated to this.</a>
      
  </p></span>
</details>

<details>
  <summary>I spotted a mistake in some software's data. What should I do?</summary>
  <span><p>

      We list each software manually to make it appear on the database. So we tend to make mistakes sometimes. Don't hesitate to tell it to us. <a href="https://notabug.org/jyamihud/FreeCompetitors/issues/24">We have a special comment thread dedicated to this.</a>
      
  </p></span>
</details>

<details>
  <summary>How can I help the project?</summary>
  <span><p>

      You can help us in four ways:<br><br>

      * By helping us list software on the website.<br>
      * By hosting an instance.<br>
      * By helping us improve software that hosts the website.<br>
      * And by spreading the word about it.<br><br>

      Please click on the "SOURCE" button in the end of the page to get started.
      
      
  </p></span>
</details>

<details>
  <summary>Does this project have an official Discord room?</summary>
  <span><p>

      If you will look up <a href="/discord">Discord</a> on the website. You will see that it's Non-Free Software. Thus we don't use Discord.<br><br>
      But we do hangout in a chat using the <a href="https://matrix.org">[matrix]</a> protocol.<br>

      <code>#freecompetitors:matrix.org</code>
      
      
      
  </p></span>
</details>

<br><br>
Now search for something and get a list of Free Competitors for it.

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