The open source movement has taken some time to become what it is today, prominent and almost everywhere. You have almost every single piece of popular software replaced with an open source alternative. You also have video games which have been remade in an open source environment. Popular shooters, strategy games and the like, all remade so that they can be downloaded and played for free, as well as, apps like PhonePE which can help you bet with liberty and ease. Well, for that reason and for many other reasons like security, love of gaming and the freedom which comes with having open source software.

But, where does one download all of this? Well, there are several sites which you could visit to download all the necessary software, but, there are also the developers’ sites, which sometimes host the files.

Here are the sites which you will most likely visit when downloading open source software.

SourceForge

The name says it all, or does it? It actually does, when you think about it, it is THE site to visit when in need of open source software. The site has been around since 1999. The site has history, though not all of it has been great. You could download software for a long time, but through its early days, there were lots of ads which made you click fifty times before getting to the software.

Given that things change, so has their policy. They no longer have ads. They are a platform which supports open source development. They have over 300,000 open source projects and plenty of developers, in the millions. They also host plenty of projects which are open source, meaning that once you click that download link on the developer’s site, you get transferred to Sourceforge servers.

Github

This site isn’t user friendly at all, when it comes to downloading software. But, with a little bit of trial and error, you can learn to download what you actually need. This site is actually a platform for developers to meet and greet, or rather, submit their code, so that others can use it, reuse it, modify it, or contribute to it. It is the site where developers often go to find the code that they need, or to find the developers they need. This site hosts so many projects that stats are unnecessary.

While you might have some trouble learning how to download the stuff you need, once you get the hang of it, you will have no issues finding everything and anything. Who knows, you might even get inspired to learn how to code and start contributing.

Tigris

This site is another hosting platform for open source projects. But, this site has a very strong code about reviewing projects, meaning that you will unlikely see a project which is dead or is not getting any community contributions and feedback. Dead projects often make people sad and are cluttering the servers. Visit Tigris if you want to be sure that what you’re downloading is being updated frequently and is still in development.

OSDN

OSDN is a site which hosts projects and helps people download free software. It is easier to use than some sites, but it is also minimalistic in its design. There are plenty of projects here, around 55,000, and even some bigger names, like Manjaro, the Linux distribution based on Aarch, host their files and projects there. OSDN stands for Open Source Development Network, and by its name, it focuses on development, but doesn’t shy away from providing downloads to users.

These are the best sites you can download open source software from, as well as use if you are a developer.