TAG

# Open Source

2026-10-13

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #28: Liang Wenfeng

Founder of quantitative fund High-Flyer and architect of DeepSeek. Uncomfortable with Silicon Valley-style evangelism, he led a small team of engineers to crush AI pricing monopolies with Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA), FP8 mixed-precision, and hyper-efficient training — and with DeepSeek-R1's pure reinforcement learning reasoning, gave Silicon Valley its first genuine existential anxiety from native Chinese innovation. Ranked

2026-10-07

100 Products That Changed the World · #15: Android

The first Android phone, the HTC Dream, was announced on September 23, 2008. Eighteen years later Android is on version 17. It got into billions of phones because of one product decision: open source, free for phone makers to use. Android ranks #15 overall at 92.75, with scale 99 its highest score and originality 85 its lowest.

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.