Open movement

Open Movement

Wikimedia South Africa supports other projects in the open and free knowledge movement. We encourage everyone to participate in these projects in addition to the Wiki movement. Below are some of these projects.

OpenStreetMap is a free, open-source geographic database that anyone can edit. It is updated and maintained by a community of volunteers from all over the world. OpenStreetMap data is used to create maps, navigation systems, and other applications.

Creative Commons South Africa is non-profit organization and community devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share using the Creative Commons copyright license in South Africa. It is part of the international Creative Commons non-profit network.

Wikimedia South Africa supports the open software movement and encourages the use of free open software. Both free as in free from cost and free as in freedom of speech. We have prepared a list of free and open software that anyone can use to do a variety of tasks. All software is free to download and use and compatible with Windows and Linux operating systems, some are also aviable for iOS. These are our suggestions to get started using open software.

Blender is a powerful free and open-source software program for 3D modeling, animation, video editing, and rendering.

LibreOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite similar to MSOffice. It comes with a word processor, spreadsheet, and presenter for slide shows.

Open Software

The Gimp (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor similar to Adobe Photoshop.

Ubuntu is a mostly free and open-source Operating System (OS) based on Linux. If Ubuntu is not for you then there are many other free and open Linux distributions to choose from such as Linux Mint and Pop!_OS, all of them are a great choice if you want to move away from non-free operating systems like Windows or iOS.

Inkscape is a free and open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator.

Jitsi is an online free and open-source video conferencing and messaging service similar to Google Meet or Zoom. We have found it to be more reliable, simple and compatible than Zoom for group calls but it lacks a number of ‘nice to have’ features.

Photo credits

Ngorongoro Wildebeest by Schuyler Shepherd
CC-BY-SA 2.5

GIMP 2.10 by The GIMP Team
CC-BY-SA 4.0

Inkscape_1.2.2_Screenshot_Windows_11 by Victor Erlund
CC-BY-SA 4.0

Blender 3.5 beta screenshot by Blender Foundation
CC-BY-SA 4.0

LibreOffice_7.5_start_center_screenshot by Aliendude5300
CC-BY-SA 4.0

Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster English.png by Canonical Ltd.
GNU General Purpose Licence