Open Source Software - Why We Need to Fix Funding

Over the years Homebrew, an open source package manager, has emerged as the project with the greatest number of individual contributors. Despite all that, it’s creator Max Howell, couldn’t make a living off the occasional charity of the millions of people who used the software he built. This XKCD cartoon is probably the most frequently repeated joke on the podcast over the last three years.

While he is not a crypto bull, Max was inspired with a solution for the open source funding dilemma  by his efforts to buy and sell an NFT. A contract written in code and shared in public enforced a rule sending a portion of his proceeds to the digital objects original creator. What if the same funding mechanism could be applied to open source projects? 

In March of 2022, Max and his co-founder launched Tea, a sort of spirtual successor to Homebrew. It has a lot of new features Max wanted in a package manager, plus a blockchain based approach to ensuring that creators, maintainers, and contributors of open source software can all get paid for their efforts. 

You can read Max’s launch post on Tea here and yes, of course there is a white paper. Follow him on Twitter here.