Topic · across the network

Open source

The most valuable software in the world, given away.

45: briefs
4: subjects
9:38: average
433 min: in total

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design.briefs Design

All 7 in design →

10:42

Erik Spiekermann

Typography is not about taste — it’s about infrastructure, and Spiekermann built it.

6:38

Inter (typeface)

Inter isn’t prettier than Roboto—it’s legible where Roboto fails, and that’s why it replaced it.

4:16

Lato is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Łukasz Dziedzic and released in 2010. It was commissioned by a Polish bank, then cancelled and published under the Open Font License. As of August 2018, it appeared on over 9.6 million websites and ranked third on Google Fonts by usage. It has been applied in physical media including election billboards and information signs, and adopted by Save the Children for its logotype since 2022.

6:40

Source Sans

A pragmatic open-source sans-serif built to fix News Gothic’s uneven colour — not to reinvent typography.

11:34

IBM Plex

IBM Design · 2017

IBM Plex is a corporate typeface designed to replace Helvetica across IBM’s global communications. Its rationale is financial and ideological: open-source licensing eliminates licence fees; typographic decisions reject expressive or historical categories in favour of functional clarity. It delivers a coherent, documented system — but only within the narrow frame of IBM’s internal brand requirements.

10:08

Open Sans

Steve Matteson · 2010

Open Sans is a functional, open-source humanist sans-serif designed by Steve Matteson for Google in 2011. It prioritises screen legibility through wide apertures and large x-height, supports Latin, Greek, Cyrillic (897 glyphs), gained Hebrew and variable font support in 2021, and manifests publicly via a Google Easter egg. It does not extend beyond those scripts. Its influence lies in normalising open-source, cross-platform typography — not aesthetic innovation.

11:22

Roboto

Christian Robertson · 2011

Roboto is a functional, open, and pervasive sans-serif typeface family designed by Christian Robertson for Google in 2011. It succeeded by solving a narrow problem well — legibility on early Android screens — then scaled through permissive licensing and platform integration.

games.briefs Games

All 4 in games →

9:44

StepMania

Chris Danford · 2001

StepMania is a cross-platform rhythm video game and engine originally developed as a clone of Dance Dance Revolution, evolving into an extensible rhythm game engine supporting various rhythm-based game types. Its core gameplay involves scrolling arrows meeting stationary targets in time with the song's beat, scored by timing accuracy, letter grade, and numeric score. Highest performance yields AAA+, requiring flawless timing, mine avoidance, and full hold arrow completion; failure results in an E grade when the life gauge fully depletes. It runs on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and Xbox.

8:54

Warsow (video game)

Amanieu d'Ohsson · 2005

Warsow is a movement-first FPS built on Quake II. Its design forces mastery of physics-based tricks—dash, dodge, wall jump, rocket jump—as the sole path to advantage. It trades narrative, progression and accessibility for purity of motion and competitive clarity.

10:44

Far Cry 4

Ubisoft Montreal · 2014

Far Cry 4 is a polished, iterative open-world shooter that prioritises environmental spectacle and weapon-led combat over narrative weight or systemic innovation. It works best when treated as a tactical sandbox — not a story world.

9:55

Far Cry 5

Ubisoft Montreal · 2018

Far Cry 5 is a first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and released in 2018. It runs on the Dunia engine. Players explore Hope County freely on foot or by vehicle. They customise their silent protagonist, engage in ranged and melee combat, and use a ballistics system with bullet drop. Progression is region-based: most of the world opens after the intro, and Resistance Points earned through actions trigger story events.

technology.briefs Technology

All 31 in technology →

9:36

Apache ActiveMQ

ActiveMQ made JMS mainstream—but its Java roots and 2007-era architecture now hold back the very systems it was meant to unify.

9:10

Fused filament fabrication

Crump

Fused filament fabrication is fused deposition modeling repackaged: same thermoplastic extrusion mechanism, same 1988 origin, same patent. RepRap renamed it to escape Stratasys’ trademark. Its real impact arrived only after the 2009 patent expiry enabled open hardware development. It delivers functional prototypes—not precision parts. It trades repeatability for accessibility.

9:41

Google Chrome

Chrome didn’t win by being better—it won by becoming infrastructure.

8:56

Jenkins (software)

Jenkins isn’t better software than Hudson—it’s the same software with a democratically ratified name.

9:25

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ isn’t about speed—it’s about certainty in chaos.

10:49

RISC-V

UC Berkeley researchers · 2010

RISC-V is a free and open instruction set architecture developed in 2010 at UC Berkeley. Its specifications were published openly in 2011 and stewardship transferred to RISC-V International in 2015. It enables royalty-free processor design—but does not eliminate the engineering, tooling, or ecosystem work required to deploy it.

9:30

OLPC XO

A noble failure: the XO delivered rugged, flash-based Linux laptops to children — but broke its core promises on price, power, and peer networking.

10:03

Go (programming language)

Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson · 2009

Go is a statically typed, compiled programming language designed in 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson at Google to improve programming productivity for multicore, networked machines and large codebases. It combines static typing and runtime efficiency like C, readability and usability like Python, and high-performance networking and multiprocessing. Publicly announced in November 2009 and released as version 1.0 in March 2012, Go emphasizes simplicity, safety, and developer tooling — especially around concurrency via goroutines and channels, packaging, testing, and deployment — while deliberately omitting features like inheritance, assertions, pointer arithmetic, and implicit type conversions. Its design reflects a focus on the software development process itself rather than just language syntax or semantics.

culture.briefs Culture

All 3 in culture →

9:00