Years before China’s DeepSeek stunned the world with its powerful open-source AI model, Chinese tech geeks began experimenting with the openness ethos through a collaboratively written open-source novel, still going strong after nearly two decades. With millions of words spanning nearly 3,000 chapters, The Morning Star of Linggao has been crowd-written by thousands of contributors – mostly tech geeks, engineers, military enthusiasts and STEM professionals – who insert themselves as characters in...