Technology is one of the most impactful drivers of transformation and innovation. As more people adopt different tech concepts, more proponents have called for increased collaboration across the board. Today, open-source technologies provide a way for people to connect and contribute to the growth of different products and services. With technology touching different facets of our existence and people looking to get on the forefront of this development, there is no doubt that open-source technologies are necessary for growth and diverse advancement. However, the tech landscape we live in is undergoing a major shift. Web3 is currently the biggest craze on the internet right now, describing a future where the internet becomes more privacy-enabled and user-controlled. Already, there are several platforms in the Web3 space that are looking to usher in the next evolution of the Internet. And, Tea is one service looking to help software contributors earn money while building the world of Web3. In this interview, we spoke to Max Howell - creator of Homebrew as well as the founder of Tea & pkgx - to understand his vision for the platform and its future. 1. How do you see the future of Web3 going forward? Web3 isn’t new. Web2 wasn’t new. They were both natural evolutions of the Internet. The Internet has always been built by the hackers. The nerds who fricking love the technology they are building and don’t care about anything else. In my 20s I spent every waking moment at my computer working on open source with randoms I met on the Internet who just happened to agree with me: we were building something cool that was going to make the world a better place. It turned out we built web2. The foundations of it anyway. Web2’s fortunes are entirely built on top of open source. Our free labor with no compensation. Most of us started to realize a few years ago that we’d helped build something awful. Centralizing control with people who took advantage of it and demonstrated how much they didn’t deserve it. Centralization has allowed the worst sides of humanity to emerge, even worse. The people who built web1 built web2 and are building web3. Its ascent is inevitable. We just have to correctly incentivize the builders. 2. Are you a proponent of big companies building Web3 platforms or individual developers? I am a huge believer in the open source development model. Despite attempts to tame it and control it by huge enterprise companies like Microsoft and Sun during the early 2000s it rose up to dominate our entire world in spite of the wealth they burnt to try and stop us. Open source is not corporate. Open source is not capitalist. Open source is something else. This is why it has come to exist in all software at every layer of the stack. Every layer but the very top, the 1% that is proprietary code that is how web2 has made their fortunes without paying for 99% of their codebases. Open Source is something else. Which is why it has taken something new to figure out how to make open source sustainable. That something else is smart contracts on the tea protocol. Nothing else will work. 3. What do you think is the biggest factor in Web3 adoption? Stop talking about web3. Stop talking about blockchain. Stop talking about decentralization. Normal people are not swayed by this shit, by buzzwords. They care about features, about the value they can extract from products. Talk about why your product is better than anything web2 can make. Only talk about the technology with technologists. 4. How does Tea’s reward system work? The existing systems suffer from what we call the “favorites” problem. There’s 50 million open source projects. A fraction of a percent of them are popular enough, let alone even known well enough, to receive bounties or sponsorship. We see this emerge on a regular basis where fundamental pieces of open source encounter major issues which have an exponential effect on the entire software ecosystem. tea sees how the problem with fixing open source comes from the very nature of open-source which is entirely different from any other systems humanity has built. The open source model works because we have built amazing technologies to rapidly iterate. The entire software ecosystem includes a myriad of tools, some of which are called package managers. With these tools small contributions can be used as a foundation to huge achievements, like bricks laid in a tower. Because of this, a typical app can be composed of tens of thousands of open source projects. There’s no way to reward all these projects without understanding all the connections between them and distributing rewards based on that ranking. tea’s oracle system crunches the numbers using information from all the different package managers to determine the impact of each individual project to the entire open-source ecosystem. We call it Proof of Contribution. Registered projects earn rewards based on their impact and anyone in the community can stake tokens into that system to demonstrate their support for the project, improve its reputation and, in return, earn epoch rewards. This approach and its associated penalties when issues are reported but ignored, contribute to the security of the software supply-chain, so to reward those who reviewed the code and put their stake behind it, those rewards are passed to both the staked projects, and the staker, as thanks for securing the software supply-chain. Also, the rewards that pass to staked projects are split and passed to that project’s dependencies, so on and so forth to ensure that all contributions in the tree are rewarded for their efforts. 5. Would you prefer a developer-led Web3 frontier or do you believe that collaboration still plays a key role? Developers are the pioneers. But we are building technology for people and thus we must bring other kinds of people in. As I said before, web3 is still in the “whatever” phase for most people. Many don’t remember but web2 was also scorned at its infancy. What changed was that people learned how to market their use of web2 technologies properly. They achieved this by starting to bring other kinds of people into the fold. Web3 is devs and finance people RN. We need to bring in the next genre of people. 6. How does tea protocol incorporate the TEA token into its operating model? TEA is a cryptographic token which serves as the access key to certain parts and designated features of the tea Protocol. Holders of TEA token have the ability to: Register their packages; Support packages by staking TEA tokens to specific packages; Contribute to the security of the software supply chain by challenging packages and conducting reviews to report bugs and/or vulnerabilities. The tea protocol unlocks the open-source economy and creates value for builders, maintainers, and end-users of enterprise software. Ultimately, the value captured by the tea protocol accrues back to token holders as the community scales, creating a feedback loop that further incentivizes participation. Conclusion: With the tech landscape witnessing a seismic shift, it’s understandable that many are concerned about how collaboration will work going forward. And as Web3 takes shape, platforms like Tea are here to ensure that developers get their due.
