OCRopus is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities. The OCRopus engine is based on two research projects: a high-performance handwriting recognizer developed in the mid-90’s and deployed by the US Census bureau, and novel high-performance layout analysis methods. OCRopus is development is sponsored by Google.

The Tesseract OCR engine was one of the top 3 engines in the 1995 UNLV Accuracy test. Since then it has had little work done on it, but it is probably one of the most accurate open source OCR engines available. The source code will read a binary, grey or color image and output text. A tiff reader is built in that will read uncompressed TIFF images, or libtiff can be added to read compressed images.

Some free and open-source projects come with commercial-support. Usually a subscription based service is sold offering 24/7 helpdesks and full-time developers who help modifying the system to individual business needs. FOSS business models dual-license

Second Life is a web service that offers an interactive 3d world. The source code behind the Second Life server is proprietary, however the client is an open source project. See Also DedicatedWorldServer Second-Life

Code::Blocks is a C/C++ IDE built with configurability and extensibility in mind. It is built around a plugin framework that allows it to be extended through the use of external libraries (plugins).

WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client for Windows using SSH. Legacy SCP protocol is also supported. Its main function is safe copying of files between a local and a remote computer.

Dual licensing is a business model for free and open source software. There is usually one copyleft community license such as GNU GPL and a commercial proprietary license sold for companies who do not want to release their source-code of the application derived from it. FOSS business models commercial-support

gameswf (pronounced “game swiff”) is an open source Public Domain library for parsing and rendering SWF movies, using 3D hardware APIs for rendering. It is designed to be used as a UI library for computer and console games.

a project which aims at producing Open Source 3D drivers for nVidia cards. Nouveau is made of 3 components : DDX (2D driver), DRI (3D driver) and DRM (kernel component). The DDX and DRI use the MIT license, the DRM uses a dual MIT/GPL license. REnouveau is under GPL.

ISPConfig is an open source hosting control panel for Linux.

A software distribution is a bundle of a specific software, already compiled and configured. Sometimes free and open-source software distributions are sold together with commercial support. See Also linux-distribution – popular example

xt-commerce is a distribution of osCommerce which is sold with commercial support.

BOINC is open-source software for volunteer computing and desktop grid computing. People can share their unused computer ressources to aid scientists and medicine.

An Free and Open Source Software project that is unmaintained lacks of somebody who actively develops it. This is a real problem as it becomes incompatible to the latest changes in libraries it depends on and known bugs don’t get fixed nor new features can be added as contributions by other developers cannot be applied. Weblinks unmaintained-free-software.org – a GNU FDL-licensed wiki of unmaintained/orphaned Free Software projects which are in need of a new maintainer.