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Free and Open Source Software
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colord - manage, install and generate colour profiles
colord is a system service for managing, installing and generating colour profiles. It provides a central service that applications can use to associate hardware devices with the appropriate ICC colour profiles, helping maintain consistent colour handling across the desktop.
The software runs as a system-activated daemon, starting when a graphical or command-line client needs it rather than running unnecessarily. Applications communicate with the daemon through a D-Bus API, while colord maintains persistent device-to-profile mappings in a database. It can also provide system-wide colour settings that apply across users and sessions.
This is free and open source software.
Open Source Alternatives to Proprietary Software
Open source software gives users access to its source code and the freedom to use, study, modify and redistribute the software according to its licence. That does not automatically make every open source program better than a proprietary competitor, but it can provide important advantages.
Open source alternatives can reduce dependence on a single vendor, avoid recurring licence fees, provide greater control over data and deployment, and allow software to continue evolving even if its original developer changes direction. Self-hosted software can also offer an alternative to handing data to third-party cloud services.
For Linux users, open source software has another obvious attraction: many proprietary applications either offer limited Linux support or do not support Linux at all.
The best choice ultimately depends on what you need. Our individual guides examine the available options and highlight the strongest open source alternatives for each product or service.
jdaviz - interactive astronomical data visualisation and analysis tools
jdaviz provides specialised viewers for several forms of astronomical data. Image viewers handle two-dimensional imagery and support operations such as aperture photometry and catalogue exploration. Spectrum viewers work with one- and two-dimensional spectra and provide extraction, measurement and spectral-line fitting facilities. Cube viewers support spectroscopic data cubes and extraction of one-dimensional spectra.
Table, scatter and histogram viewers provide additional ways to explore catalogue and tabular data. The application is particularly designed around observational modes from the James Webb Space Telescope, although its data handling is intended to support observations from other astronomical facilities as well.
This is free and open source software.
aTrain - automatically transcribe recorded speech
aTrain is a graphical application for automatically transcribing recorded speech while keeping source audio and resulting text on the user’s own computer.
The software is particularly suited to interviews and other research recordings where confidentiality, data protection and later qualitative analysis matter. Transcription uses faster-whisper, while optional speaker detection uses pyannote.audio to associate transcript segments with individual speakers. Alongside its desktop interface, aTrain provides command-line facilities for headless workflows, scripts and automated processing.
This is free and open source software.