TAG

# Free Software

2026-07-08

Hundreds of MCP Servers and Claude Skills, and Barely Any Are Truly Free and Open Source. I Checked Them One by One and Turned It Into a Directory

I wanted to add a few MCP servers to Claude, and the more I searched the more annoyed I got. Out of hundreds, half are only free if you hand over an API key. A whole batch flies the open-source flag but really means source-available, not for commercial use — Sentry's MCP is under the FSL license, and Anthropic's own document skills flatly say all rights reserved. Some repos don't even have a LICENSE file, which legally means all rights reserved by default. The ones that are actually MIT or Apache, install-and-go, no account needed, you can only tell apart by opening every LICENSE one by one. I went through sixty-odd of them and collected the genuinely free and open ones into a bilingual directory: To Be Free. This piece is about how I sorted them, which of the truly free ones are worth installing first (gstack, ruflo, the official MIT servers…), and why this is the next step in my rebuild-free-software line.

2026-07-06

You ordered it in the comments — so I built it: SoloPic, a free image tool

At the end of my last piece — 'Why I'm Rebuilding 100 Free Software Tools' — I asked: which one do you most wish someone would rebuild for you? A reader from Tianjin named Axiang left three specific requirements in the comments: batch edge-crop, batch rename via a mapping file, and batch brightness/contrast. I replied 'Got it — the core is batch processing, right?' and then spent a few days building it: SoloPic, a free, offline, 12 MB batch image tool, built exactly to his spec, right down to 'crop 100px from the left and 57px from the bottom.' This piece is about how that one comment became real, working software — and why the best candidates for the '100 free tools' project aren't in my head. They're in your comments.

2026-07-05

Zero marketing, zero code, 22,000 downloads in three months: a coding beginner's open-source journey

Three months ago I set myself a goal that sounded a little crazy: build the best free Markdown editor out there. The crazy part wasn't 'best.' It was 'free' — and more than that, it was the fact that I can't write code. Three months later, SoloMD has shipped 30 versions, been downloaded more than 22,000 times, and picked up over 400 GitHub stars — with almost no marketing on my end. This piece is about those three months: why I was determined to build free software that doesn't treat users as a revenue source, how someone who can't write a single line of code actually shipped it, the bet I made on day one (the people using software aren't only people anymore), and how I felt the day a stranger sent me ¥10.

2026-07-01

Why I'm Rebuilding 100 Free Software Tools

You want to strip a watermark off a PDF. The free tool you install starts popping ads the next day, hijacks your homepage, quietly ships your data somewhere, and then makes you upgrade to export. The real pain of free software runs three layers deep: you're sold as the product, nobody's paid to polish it, and free is just the hook to force you to pay. For years you had no choice but to put up with it, because building a good replacement was too expensive. AI just cut that cost down to something one person can carry. I've already rebuilt six this way — SoloMD, Unterm, unfetch, Unflick, Ziplark, FreeID Photo — and there are ninety-four more to go.