April publishes a Free Software catalogue

Paris, December 2nd, 2010.

April publishes the Free Catalogue: 26 free software to be discovered. This document complements an ever growing list of tools aiming at raising awareness regarding free software in order to give everyone the keys of his freedom at the digital era.

April's "Raising awareness" workgroup elaborated a paper catalogue of free software, entitled "Free Catalogue: 26 free software to be discovered". The stake of this 60+ pages document is double. On one hand, it presents free software corresponding to computer daily uses; for example: "play a video", to refer to the famous VLC multimedia player. On the other hand, the catalogue was written in a perspective of promotion, its content is enhanced with series of texts, detailing the stakes related to free software and other pertaining subjects.

Thus, the present guide introduces free and gratuitous software to the general public, covering all of the most common computer usages (Multimedia, Office, Education, Internet). Each of these pieces of software is under a free license, disposes of a French translation and a multi-OS version. The concepts of Free are explained in the framed texts going with the software notes.

"We led this project during several months. It was born with a regular assessment during our many participations to different events, to meet people obviously interested in free software, but discouraged by the mandatory Internet step. Moreover it is impossible to an uninformed public to easily get computers natively equipped with free software.1" indicates François Poulain, April administrator and coordinator of this project. He adds: "By making available such a guide, our ambition is to facilitate public equipment by identifying quality software resources, but also to pass knowledge to people for a better comprehension of the digital stakes. To summarize: offering to everyone the keys of his freedom at the digital era"

After the poster "Free software: how it works?", the Free Catalogue enriches an ever more complete collection of documents aiming at raising awareness, of which a selection is available on April's website. These ones are dedicated to the free software promotion, under free license, and available in open standards. April encourages everybody to copy, share and modify these documents according to the terms of their licenses.

About April

Pioneer of free software in France, April is since 1996 a major player in the democratization and the spread of Free Software and open standards to the general public, professionals and institutions in the French-speaking world. In the digital era that is ours, it also aims to inform the public on the dangers of an exclusive appropriation of information an knowledge by private interests.

The association has over 5,400 members, using or producing Free Software.

For more information, you may go to the following website: http://www.april.org/, contact us by phone at +33 178 769 280 or through our contact form.

Press contacts:

Frédéric Couchet, Executive Director, fcouchet@april.org +33 660 688 931

• 1. Thereupon, refer to our file about "bundle selling.