TAG

# Open Source

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.

2026-07-05

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.