Intro

Max’s blog post on our announcement day is a great summary of our mission, he touches on how difficult it was making homebrew without compensation and how we’re setting out to fix “the Nebraska Problem”: Something new is brewing

This link has a good summary of our white paper, and a link to the paper itself: Tea Releases Whitepaper Outlining Decentralized Protocol for Rewarding Open-Source Developers

Here is my favorite interview Max has done (so far!), a “Dev & Tell” with the Developer DAO community.

Michael Schwartz: Hello, and welcome to Open Source Underdogs! I’m your host, Mike Schwartz and this is episode 57, an interview with Max Howell of Tea.xyz. Max is the third Web3 guest – see episode 37 and 56 for the other two.

He has some notoriety as the founder of the Brew repository. That’s relevant here because Tea is a next generation Web3 package repository toolkit that developers can use to build properly incentivized open-source ecosystems. It’s a wildly disruptive vision of how we can make open-source software more equitable, more secure, and more innovative.

Tea’s published a white paper about how they intend to build a new layer one blockchain, but Tea’s also a well-funded startup that’s making a two-year roadmap to make all this Web3 tokenized repository ecosystem stuff a reality. If you’re like me, some of this blockchain jargon may go over your head. For example, what’s the difference between Proof of Work and Proof of Stake? What’s a DAO? What are Cosmos and Polkadot? My advice is, just go along with the jargon, hit pause, and do some Googling in the background.

Web 3

With that said, without further ado, let’s cut over to the interview with Max. Big welcome to Max Howell, CEO of Tea Inc. and renowned founder of Homebrew, the ubiquitous package manager for macOS. Max, welcome to the podcast.

Max Howell: Thanks for having me here.

Michael Schwartz: You mentioned in a previous podcast that you were into computer science major as an undergraduate, maybe before we dive into Web 3, and all the business model stuff, you could tell us a little bit about how you ended up in the tech business and open source.

Max Howell: Sure thing. So, I have a chemistry degree. It’s a British masters, which means it’s four years and not as prestigious as the US masters. That came from thinking I wanted to do science. I think I was undue influenced by all the ‘80s movies, where scientists were changing the world and saving the world and being cool in general.

And I did a year in chemistry in the lab. And it was like, three months, and I was like, “I can’t do this.” It was boring. I stuck it out for another nine months. And then I quit. I was like, “I got to figure out something else to do myself.” And programming had always been a hobby, but dad had introduced it to me when I was six. And I’d done a bunch of programming here and there as a hobby yeast, and never considered it for a career.

Partly because when I went to the career fair, as a 17-year-old, and I met some programmers there, they were just like the geekiest people I’d ever met. And I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t want to be like that!”

But I fell back into it, after quitting the job and moving back in with my parents and not really knowing what to do. Obviously, I was like in this depressed funk. And then I found open source, I installed Linux. And I found the communities that are out there for open source, and this was back in like 2003/2004, and fell in love with it basically. I started making apps, go involved with a bunch of apps on desktop Linux, worked for KDE, contributed bunch to KDE.

And then, that got me a career in the industry. I found this job in London, they contacted me because of the work I’ve been doing on this music player called Amarok. And that got me into it.

What is Web3?

Michael Schwartz: So, one more warm-up question. What’s your definition of Web3? For example, like, what features distinguish a Web2 piece of software from a Web3 piece of software?

Max Howell: Web3 is just the natural evolution of how the Internet has gone. And I think Web2 especially – we lost the web, right? If we go back to where the web came from, where the Internet came from, and what it was about, it’s all open source at the beginning. Everything about how it was developed, was decentralized, and not monetized, and for the benefit of everybody by putting information out there and making open API’s and programmable interfaces and small tools that could interact with each other and create a network for humanity.

And Web3 really, for me, is just an acknowledgement that we lost our way with Web2. And then we centralized everything. And we gave too many big companies too much power and control over how it’s built. Even open source, and like maybe even especially open source.

So, I don’t like the way open source is now mostly developed by companies. All the big projects, they purchase, well, they hire – we don’t want to say purchase – they hire the developers who work on these important projects. And then, that company then like controls it essentially.

I believe that they don’t intend to do malicious things with these projects. But like, at the end of the day, I don’t trust Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. It’s who build this essential infrastructure that makes the Internet work.

So, I love the fact that Web3 is also returning to some sort of roots movement with open source, where people are building themselves, and like, tokenization is part of the reason that that’s possible. You don’t need a company to support you.

What Makes a Web3 App?

Mike Schwartz: You know, Tim Berners-Lee recently said something like, “My decentralized web doesn’t need blockchain. And because the Internet was already pretty decentralized, and maybe even still is with, like, a billion domains and millions of autonomous web servers.

I get the ethos and the aspiration of Web3 that you’re expressing. But is there a technology underpinnings or infrastructure that’s available in Web3 that wasn’t in Web 2? What makes Web3 app?

Max Howell: We’re developers and engineers, and we love to, like, define things precisely. But, you know, I don’t think these things can be defined that precisely. Tim Berners – Lee, probably his internet still is as decentralized as it was initially, because he’s probably still using all these Web1 tools, and hasn’t really migrated. I doubt he has a Facebook account or anything like that. But for the vast majority of us, we’re using these highly centralized chunks of the Internet that have massive sandboxes around them. And that’s what we need to be working on to get rid of.

You know, blockchain is a part of Web3, because that was the ingenious invention that allowed us to understand that we can make databases that are decentralized, where we were struggling to do that. And a lot of people still don’t think it’s that important. But, you know, the recent crypto crash, it was pretty impressive how DeFi stood up while all these centralized systems collapsed.

So, for me, that means that you don’t even need to prove that Web3 is the way forwards, it’s just going to prove itself, as Web2 continues to have issues with centralization.

What is the Monetizing Strategy?

Michael Schwartz: Before we go down the blockchain rabbit hall at a high level, Tea Inc. is a for-profit company. What is the basic plan for Tea to monetize? Is it going to be a strategy similar to other Web3 startups?

Max Howell: Yeah, so, we’re a well-funded startup. And we’re currently raising a little more. Like, our intention is to give ourselves like two, three years of runway, so that we can build a kick-ass suite of products, which also allow for the open-source ecosystem to be remunerated.

But after that, essentially, we see the package manager component of what we’re offering as a form of an app store. And we see ways that we can, like monetize — it sounds terrible to say we’re monetizing open source, and that isn’t what we’re doing.

Like, we’re not changing the nature of open source at Tea. It’s important that we emphasize that fact. You can’t change something that’s so established 25, 30 years, even more, that it’s existed like 100% free, and everything about what we’re doing is still free. And our remuneration system, which we’ll talk about later, with no doubt, understands that. And that’s a key part of it.

So, any monetization we apply on top of that will be an opt-in kind of way of doing things, where we allow like teams and enterprises and businesses that are using the Tea product suite to gain extra value out of the fact that they’re a business, and that they need systems that help the dev employees to work more effectively. So, we have a number of ideas there, but they’re under wraps currently still.

Why Tea Blockchain v. DAO?

Michael Schwartz: Why a Tea Blockchain and not a Tea DAO? Or, is there also a DAO?

Max Howell: Yeah, there will also be a DAO, we need some kind of blockchai