About FreedomSoft
FreedomSoft is an independent effort to place capable academic software in the hands of students without charge.
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
- FreedomTex is published under the MIT licence and may be inspected by anyone
The author
FreedomSoft is the work of Shahid Zafar, a doctoral candidate at 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 was released so that other students would not face the same obstacle.
The work is carried out independently and in addition to doctoral study. Development is conducted in the open, and the source code, release history and issue reports for FreedomTex are published on GitHub.
Dedication
FreedomSoft is dedicated to the students of Multimedia University (MMU), Malaysia. The university provided the environment in which this work began, and the applications are offered first of all to its students, and then to students everywhere who face the same costs.
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.
Applications are distributed through GitHub, which applies its own privacy policy when a file is downloaded.
FreedomSoft software is always free. If these applications save you the cost of a subscription, that is the whole of the intention.