FreedomSoftAbout FreedomSoft
An independent effort to place capable academic software in the hands of students.
The purpose
The tools on which academic work depends have steadily moved towards paid subscriptions. A student who wishes to typeset a thesis properly, to protect personal material, or to deliver a lecture with confidence is now asked to pay a recurring fee for each of these activities. For a postgraduate student who is already meeting tuition fees and living costs, often in a foreign country, such charges are not a minor inconvenience.
FreedomSoft was founded on the view that this cost is unnecessary. The applications published here perform the same work as their commercial counterparts, run on ordinary computers, and are supplied without payment of any kind. They are intended in particular for students and early career researchers, although anyone is welcome to use them.
Undertakings
- Every application is free of charge, and no paid edition will be introduced later
- No advertising is shown, in the applications or on this website
- No account is required, and personal data is not collected
- Your work remains on your own computer, and the applications function offline
- Each application is licensed for non-commercial use under the PolyForm Strict licence
The author
FreedomSoft is the work of Shahid Zafar, Multimedia University, Malaysia. The first application, FreedomTex, grew out of the ordinary difficulty of preparing a thesis in LaTeX without paying for an online editor, and it will be released so that other students need not face the same obstacle.
The work is carried out independently. Each application’s releases and issue reports are published on GitHub once it becomes available.
This website
This website consists of a small number of static pages. It contains no advertising, no analytics scripts and no tracking cookies. The only information stored by your browser is your preference for the light or dark appearance of these pages, which remains on your own device and is never transmitted.
When an application is downloaded, the website records which application and version were chosen, the time, and the approximate location (country, region and city) that Cloudflare derives from the connection. These figures are used only to count downloads. No IP address, name or other identifier is stored, and nothing is shared with anyone else.