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Only Open: What One Month of Creating With Free Resources Actually Taught Us

Only Open: What One Month of Creating With Free Resources Actually Taught Us

What happens when you commit—for real, for a full month—to building creative work using only openly licensed tools, assets, and resources? We found out, and the results were weirder, harder, and more inspiring than we expected. Spoiler: the constraints weren't the problem we thought they'd be.

Open Content, Hidden Journey: How CC-Licensed Material Travels from Free to Fee

Open Content, Hidden Journey: How CC-Licensed Material Travels from Free to Fee

A CC license is supposed to make sharing simple — but tracing where that content actually ends up reveals a supply chain that's messy, commercially lucrative, and frequently disconnected from the people who made it. We mapped the journey from a free classroom resource to a checkout page, and what we found is complicated.

Open Source Runs the Internet. So Why Are the People Who Built It Broke?

Open Source Runs the Internet. So Why Are the People Who Built It Broke?

Open-source software quietly powers everything from your bank's app to NASA's satellites, generating trillions in corporate value. But the developers maintaining that critical infrastructure are largely unpaid volunteers burning out in real time. This is the funding paradox nobody in the industry wants to talk about—and it's getting worse.