Someone wants to rebuild all software for free

A very big sentence

Most projects on GitHub want to fix one small annoyance. This one, from a team called HeyPuter, wants to rebuild "the world's software from scratch" and give all of it away as open source.

Not one app. The labels on the project read like your monthly bills: Adobe, Photoshop, office, spreadsheet, CAD, SaaS. The big paid categories, the ones most businesses quietly rent forever.

It reads less like a product launch and more like a declaration. But people noticed: in a single day it went from 1,398 to 1,790 stars and showed up in daily trending roundups.

Why it's worth a smile

Everything is released under the MIT license, which is about as generous as it gets. Anyone can use it, change it, even build a business on top of it.

For someone running a restaurant or a small agency, that matters. Today your tools come with a landlord. If projects like this succeed, even partly, some of that rent could turn into ownership.

Words worth knowing

• Open source: software whose recipe is public, so anyone can read it, improve it or run it themselves.
• MIT license: a short, permissive license. Roughly: do what you like, just keep the original credit note.
• SaaS: "software as a service". Tools you rent by subscription instead of owning.
• Stars: GitHub's version of a bookmark. A rough signal of interest, not of quality.

Something to try

Open your list of software subscriptions and circle the ones you resent paying for. Then bookmark github.com/HeyPuter/everything and check back in a few months. Ambitions this big rarely arrive all at once, but they're lovely to watch.