1-Wire is a data protocol stat allows simple connections to clever chips. The chips are uniquely addressed, and have a variety of types, including temperature and voltage sensors, switches, memory and clocks.
The base functionality is in the owlib library. It includes adapter interface, chip interface, caching, statistics, numeration and command line processing.
owfs is the filesystem portion of the package. It depends on fuse: basically, fuse (http://fuse.sourceforge.net) exposes filesystem calls in the appropriate directory to this program. This program then calls owlib to query and modify the 1-wire bus.
Despite the project name, the owfs package itself is NOT recommended for any real use, it has well known issues with races etc.
owserver is a generic backend. It can be remote, and shared by several front ends.
This is the recommended way of accessing your 1-Wire bus.
owhttpd is a simple webserver exposing owlib. It does not need a kernel module and will probably run on a greater platform variety.
owtcl, owphp, owperl, owpython are language bindings using the same backend and naming scheme as owfs
This is an old, but stable and well used, project with few people working actively on it. That said, there are a few people contributing and trying to maintain it.
If you have any bugfixes, new features or change requests, your contribution is welcome!
From mid April 2018 the source is available at https://github.com/owfs/owfs. Any interaction with developers should preferably take place via PRs and Issues here, alternatively for longer discussions the mailing list is still a good medium:
https://sourceforge.net/p/owfs/mailman/owfs-developers/
The old SourceForge GIT mirror and releases are no longer to be used.
The https://owfs.org page is still not updated to reflect the project move. This is work in progress.
If you checkout out the source
./bootstrap
./configure
make
make install
If you downloaded the source package:
./configure
make
make install
For more information: http://www.owfs.org and https://github.com/owfs/owfs-doc/wiki