13 ms·

Tea – the toolkit that builds the Internet

89 points by tnorthcutt 5y ago

activitypea 5y ago
If this is real, this is horrible news. No thanks, I don't want my package manager on the blockchain.
rektide 5y ago
Massive wall of text homepage, so many "it's secure!" "it helps teams!" "blockchain!" "monetization!" splats, but I have no idea, not a clue what it is or what it does or what it's for.
- quanticle 5y ago
  As best as I can tell, it's Homebrew, only on the blockchain. Does this help anything? Does this solve any tangible problems? Who knows? The page is so choked with buzzwords, it's impossible to tell.
  - JosephRedfern 5y ago
    Huh, turns out it was co-founded by Max Howell, author of Homebrew: https://medium.com/teaxyz/tea-brew-478a9e736638 https://medium.com/teaxyz/tea-brew-478a9e736638
    - slillibri 5y ago
      So I can safely assume that no binary trees were inverted in the creation of this?
      - qudat 5y ago
        Ooo I think the tea is burnt
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  Yeah, it always sets off my bullshit detector when I read 6 paragraphs of platitudes but still have no idea what the software actually does.
romellem 5y ago
These give some more information: - https://medium.com/teaxyz/tea-brew-478a9e736638 https://medium.com/teaxyz/tea-brew-478a9e736638 - https://www.binance.com/en/blog/ecosystem/binance-labs-leads-$8-million-seed-funding-round-for-tea-421499824684903608 https://www.binance.com/en/blog/ecosystem/binance-labs-leads... > Tea controls the graph of open source that underpins all modern digital infrastructure. Packages will be released on‐chain as NFTs with their dependency metadata included. As developers use Tea, governance tokens are available according to their real‐life usage to drive the entire open source ecosystem. ... “We’re not changing the nature of open-source. It’s still free,” explained co-founder Timothy Lewis. “Software wants to be free, but programmers need to be compensated. We’re bringing the creator economy to open source. Our vision is to fix how open-source is funded and create the tools that will accelerate its creation for the benefit of all humanity.” and > We’re moving the package registry on-chain (we’ll use a low-energy proof of stake chain). ... We’re not changing the nature of open source. It’s still free. web3 has enabled novel new ways to distribute value, and with our system people who care about the health of the open source ecosystem buy some token and stake it. Periodically, we reward this staking because it is securing our token network. We give a portion of these rewards to the staker and a portion to packages of their choice along with all the dependencies of those packages.
- FridgeSeal 5y ago
  > We’re moving the package registry on-chain Oh yes this will definitely result in an improvement of the situation. > Packages will be released on‐chain as NFTs with their dependency metadata included Hello yes, a concept called “DRM” is on the phone and it wants its licence money.
- motoboi 5y ago
  oh my
  - sph 5y ago
    It's like they used all the business jargon words in that exact order to maximise how shallow and vaporware the whole pitch sounds. NFTs, graph, governance token, (not) changing the nature of open source, creator economy, for the benefit of all humanity. Yeah, no.
jdmoreira 5y ago
My BS detector is in overdrive
travisathougies 5y ago
> tech giants accrued fortunes on the backs of people they’ve never thanked, paid or even met. I have a few open-source libraries, and I figure that... since I give them away explicitly for free... there is no expectation of being paid. If one expects to be paid, one should sell their product.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  I guess theres the larger point about appreciation, with money being the biggest way of showing that. I've heard horror stories about OSS devs getting hundreds of emails a day ripping into them for not working fast enough to fix an issue or implement a feature. It sounds like murder. When I was much younger, I used to be in awe of how OSS devs can do all this amazing stuff, put it with no expectation of compensation, get a wall of critiscm and demands back, and continue working on it stoically without burnout. As I got older, I learned that the burnout is very real and only getting worse. I'm still extremely impressed by any OSS developers ability to keep going [so you should know that at least someone appreciates you ;) ], but it doesn't seem right to me now.
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    It's been long known that having a career as an OSS developer is extremely hard. Most people just work on OSS on-and-off, as part of their day job, or a few hours every other day. I treat it as paying it forward for all the tools I use daily.
  - travisathougies 5y ago
    > I've heard horror stories about OSS devs getting hundreds of emails a day ripping into them for not working fast enough to fix an issue or implement a feature. It sounds like murder. So... while I don't get 100s of e-mails a day, I do get a good amount per year demanding I implement a feature. I point out that my personal contact details are there (as well as my corporate entity) and that we can be contacted for custom commercial work. The way I see it... OSS is my past-time. The moment there are deadlines you need to pony up
bodge5000 5y ago
This whole thing about how OSS developers should be compensated for their hard work is something I can absolutely get behind, but I'm not sure how this fixes that, or what this even is. It seems to be something do with blockchain? I'd like to say it could be one of the few decent/non-scammy implementations of a blockchain in recent years, but yeh, I can't really say that until I know what it is.
mynegation 5y ago
It is slogan- and buzzword-heavy but my best understanding is that it is a blockchain-based attempt to reward open-source contributors. As an example, lots and lots of software depends on sqlite and curl but their respective authors did not benefit proportionally from their successes. My guess: the idea is to combine dependency information with popularity scores to allow cryptocurrency flow down to the contributors in the same way reputation flows to the most referred links via PageRank. The most important question I see here is how the money is supposed to flow into that system.
- spiralpolitik 5y ago
  I'm guessing based on the information in page they plan to set up DAO and issue a token. I'm guessing users and developers can then buy-in, with tokens flowing to projects based on usage as determined by the graph stored on the blockchain. At the core if you strip away the "web 3.0" language then it's a decent idea. There is a lot of devil in the detail so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
- jrapdx3 5y ago
  In the case of sqlite (created by D. Richard Hipp) the software is public domain. Development was funded (at least in part) by corporations. The author isn't expecting payments from "ordinary" users. The author's firm charges hefty fees for consulting services. These are directed at enterprises needing "certified" versions of sqlite. I'm assuming these are companies providing software under military/government contract. So it's an interesting strategy: release sqlite as public domain. The software is used everywhere, so much so it's an indispensable part of the infrastructure. Then when giant enterprise uses it charge huge fees they gladly pay. Hipp is without doubt a genuine genius.
spiffytech 5y ago
$ sh <(curl tea.xyz) Is there a technical benefit to using this versus $ curl tea.xyz | sh
- semi-extrinsic 5y ago
  Obvs they've paid some graphics designer to say the first one looks cooler, more like a spaceship.
- mynegation 5y ago
  curl-ing the script and looking at the examples - the goal is to pass the arguments from the same command line into the script that is installed, cached, and run, e.g. "sh <(curl tea.xyz) install Thing"
vapemaster 5y ago
When I read web3 co.'s product/ tech description it almost always feels like some form of tech. literacy gaslighting. I always feel initially like there's something elusive that I'm not grokking b/c I'm not a blockchain zealot. Then I sit back and realize that it's usually because most of the examples I read are trying to solve non-technical problem (attribution, trust, etc.) with a buzzy tech solution all wrapped in a serious bit of speculation. I think there's a lot of room for improvement in the tech of our law, banking, and logistics systems (COBOL--> anything else?), but the kneejerk to some "decentralized" system that needs total but in from it's participants to work actually seems more fragmented and fragile than our current institutions...
api 5y ago
Edit: is Max Howell even involved with this? If not then it's just another cryptocurrency scam trying to monetize someone else's work. Look at: https://brew.sh https://brew.sh The donations link is at the very bottom. If they need money they should put it up at the top the way Wikipedia does and make it a one-click easy thing with an embed that takes things like Apple Pay. I've never been prompted or asked to donate to Homebrew at all.
- RL_Quine 5y ago
  This basically popped into existence 30 days ago with a discord instance and not a whole lot else. https://twitter.com/mxcl https://twitter.com/mxcl 'ceo @teaxyz_' https://www.binance.com/en/blog/ecosystem/binance-labs-leads-$8-million-seed-funding-round-for-tea-421499824684903608 https://www.binance.com/en/blog/ecosystem/binance-labs-leads... Does look like they just got caught up in making cryptobro scams though.
  - api 5y ago
    So here's the problem with this naive model... As soon as they start paying app creators, a bunch of hustle culture shonkwankers will git clone a bunch of repositories and spam a bunch of bogus apps just like they currently do with other artists' work with NFTs. Compensating creators will turn into compensating people who front-run creators and squat names and stuff. "It will be gamed. No exceptions." ... and my own new law: "The Internet is a dark forest." Announcing an opportunity to make any amount of money is the equivalent to announcing your existence in a literal dark forest. You are instantly overcome by tidal wave of spam, scams, and fraud.
    - RL_Quine 5y ago
      NPM has a market force towards people spamming uselessly small libraries, and the result has been obviously extremely poor software. I can't imagine how terrible it would be is you made direct, open financial incentives to do so.
- unmole 5y ago
snambi 5y ago
please license brew/tea to enterprises. Most of them are willing to pay for license, if the developers ask for it. It can be opensource, but add some licensable features that company will pay for.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  This. At a previous job I ended up writing quite a bit of tooling around installing and updating developer tools, for 1000+ devs. Some things that would have been a very easy sale: - private, managed brew repos - linux support - onboarding / workstation setup via Brewfile - maybe a graphical interface for that - enterprise support plan (would have been handy when `/usr/local/bin` stopped being writable some OSX versions back) Eventually a lot of it moved to NPM via artifactory for the ease of publishing & consumption.
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    > linux support What distro are you using that doesn't have a proper package manager? Brew exists precisely because this has been standard for years/decades on linux but OSX hasn't had anything built in.
    - ricardobeat 5y ago
      Of course they all do - the desire for good homebrew support (linuxbrew already exists) comes from the ease of writing formulas and scripting in Ruby, it's infinitely easier than packaging for apt / apk. Plus the fact that 80% of developers use Mac, but you can't leave the 20% out in the rain. This is for in-house software, not third party.
pcr910303 5y ago
Hmm, at a glance this looks like it’s aiming to share funds of big, top-level projects to it’s dependencies. And for that, a big component of the project is a package manager… and the whole system is notably designed by the creator of homebrew. Seems like the blockchain is involved to guarantee that the fund sharing happens automatically. I’m almost always doubtful on blockchain projects, but this does feel like something that might have a slightly bigger chance to succeed than other more scammy projects. I’d appreciate a less buzzword-heavy site though. My main objection of this would be that dependencies might start gaming the system though. Would expect a bit more info on this in the webpage.
- verdverm 5y ago
  Another issue might be dependencies that are not in the system. Does someone else keep that money? Can someone else publish your work to this system and take the money?
  - selljamhere 5y ago
    > Can someone else publish your work to this system and take the money? I had the exact same question. What sort of controls will the Tea team have to add/remove packages, or modify owners. And how would this be any different from centralized package managers?
    - verdverm 5y ago
      There's a simple formula for deciding on Blockchain... Does your platform have user created content? If so, you will need a delete operation. Is the technology you use capable of permanent and complete removal of user data? If the blockchain is only for payments, then maybe it is admissable, but there are still further considerations. This whole thing just stinks of web3 BS and another victim of the cult therein.
- kelnos 5y ago
  Re: gaming the system... If this became popular, I could totally see project X, which depends on projects Y and Z, to start vendoring Y and Z into their X itself, so that when someone else depends on X, X's maintainer gets all the teacoins (or whatever they are) and Y and Z get nothing.
squeeb 5y ago
hbn 5y ago
Do the naysayers have any actual points as to why this is a bad idea, or is it just another instance where people see the word "blockchain" and immediately start calling it bad and high-fiving each other? It seems they're going to be releasing a whitepaper. I'm willing to hear out ideas for how OSS developers could be compensated, especially if it's coming from someone who has already created a successful and well-loved project from scratch.
- and0 5y ago
  All for compensating OSS devs, and doing so automatically and implicitly via contributors and the packages they built on is a neat idea. But the blockchain. Ugh. Going by the owner's blog, which is a bit more in-depth on his reasoning and less hyperbolic: - Packages will be immutable (no more left-pad incidents) Don't need blockchain for this. Just add a ToS that you can't pull packages from the centralized repo. - Packages will always be available (we’ll use decentralized storage) NPM availability hasn't been an issue, but could be. Blockchain still not needed for decentralization. Anyone who has to download the entire chain... yeesh, gonna be huge. Scaling issue greater than NPM or Github in my opinion. - Releases will be signed by the maintainers themselves (rather than a middleman you are told you can trust) Doesn't seem to be an issue with NPM? When this happens they usually hijack an account or the github. Some sort of token to sign with can also be grabbed, especially shared between maintainers or (inevitably, because no one actually enjoys decentralization) just becomes an automated feature of Github etc. Even then this issue is solvable with NPM, don't need a blockchain to sign releases. - Tools can be built to fundamentally verify the integrity of your app’s open source constitution Don't need a blockchain. I've thought of building these myself for NPM, maybe something to check VCS release tag hash vs package. - Token can flow through the graph (this is re: financing devs) Don't need a blockchain for this, though my inner dev likes the automation.
- phphphphp 5y ago
  As far as I can understand, the project distributes and measures open-source software usage in order to collect revenue on behalf of the authors. I don’t necessarily think that’s a terrible idea but I can’t even begin to imagine why it needs a blockchain or what a blockchain could offer that couldn’t be achieved otherwise. I release my software as open-source because I am happy for people to use it for free, I don’t fully understand what problem this is solving — most open-source software usage is so widespread because it’s free, the problem is not that there’s no way to charge companies for usage — but it’ll be interesting to see how they set about doing this.
haroenv 5y ago
What the hell is this even?
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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armchairhacker 5y ago
This is actually a good idea: something like homebrew or a package manager but with a convenient way to fund packages you use, or donate money to a pool so that widely-used packages are funded, or maybe just pay a monthly fee like $5 like Coil. But blockchain is not the way to implement it. “Every project exists as an NFT.” Does that mean I’ll have to pay roughly $500 (the price to create an NFT in Etherium) if I want to deploy a package? Will I have to pay gas fees to download packages? How will I, with no interest in cryptocurrency, transfer money? Is actually a lot more straightforward to do this centralized without blockchain. There are already projects like ‘npm fund’ whose goal is to create a graph which you can use to figure out how to divide $X among package contributors, and how yo send that money to their bank accounts. If the developer actually cares about funding package maintainers they should realize that blockchain is overhyped and pivot to distributing real money, managing it through something like a PostgreSQL database instead.
- IanCal 5y ago
  > Every project exists as an NFT.” Does that mean I’ll have to pay roughly $500 (the price to create an NFT in Etherium) He says they don't want to use Ethereum mainnet so no - gas fees may be fractions of a cent. > Will I have to pay gas fees to download packages? Read operations do not require gas.
paxys 5y ago
The hallmark web3/crypto scams is that they will go on for pages and pages throwing in every buzzword under the sun, but will be unable to tell you – in simple words and under 3 sentences – what the product is what what it does.
wnolens 5y ago
Past the marketing, it's all at the very end (though poorly worded): > graph of open source [software] on‐chain creating a map we’ll use to guide value redistribution... compensated without direct payment Perhaps what they mean to say is.. `tea` facilitates a relationship between payer (commercial user of open source) and payee (open source developer of that software) with a smart contract. So.. replace payment processor and middle-man fees with smart contract and gas fees? That's mildly interesting, but I'm not even aware of a "centralized" version of this if it exists so not sure it's called for.
- wmf 5y ago
  I think Tidelift is the centralized version.
Steltek 5y ago
> Homebrew has been used by tens of millions of creators to build things we all use every day, and yet Max Howell—the creator of brew and co‐founder of tea—was unable to make a living from Homebrew alone. Homebrew is far from the foundations of Open Source or Linux. It mostly serves to prop up MacOS using Linux originated tech and make it a usable developer experience. Everyone says Apple users are more likely to pay for the things they use and that's why developing Mac and iOS apps is so important. So what happened here?
- unmole 5y ago
  Exactly. Somehow Debian and Arch package maintainers manage to make it work without resorting to Blockchain Bullshit.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    At least for Debian a lot of the mirror operation costs are covered by universities.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
madisp 5y ago
> tea’s decentralization offers tangible benefits to ecosystem security. Every layer of your apps and dapps is signed and verified on‐chain. Users can rest assured that the software they are using is what all its creators intended. In day to day development our decentralization increases reliability (leftpad is a sore memory) and gives developers the flexibility they need to turn inspiration into empires; when a single proprietry vendor controls how your stack is composed and deployed your stack is centralized and under their control. and then sh <(curl tea.xyz) install deno.land ?
- SomeCallMeTim 5y ago
  Exactly, and: >In day to day development our decentralization increases reliability (leftpad is a sore memory) ...leftpad became a problem when a commonly-used deep dependency was ripped out of the ecosystem. And because npm is centralized, they can now prohibit anyone from causing that kind of damage again, ever. Whereas in a decentralized system where people are pointing at random GitHub accounts? Yeah, they could totally delete the GitHub account (or force-push an empty repo) and cause the same exact problem as leftpad. They are claiming to solve a problem using decentralization that was caused by too much decentralization. And then using Deno as an example install...which has the exact same problem in its ecosystem. Fail piled on to more fail.
  - kyle-rb 5y ago
    It seems like he's promoting the wrong aspect of blockchain here; the benefit is immutability. The fact that you can't `npm unpublish` from the blockchain does fit the use case. But you don't need blockchain for immutability, you just need it for trustlessness. And I think in general people don't care about trustlessness enough to deal with the overhead that blockchain requires. Plus the perverse incentives that I imagine will result from having a currency that you need to buy/spend in order to publish your packages.
    - verdverm 5y ago
      You might find Sigstore and Cosign interesting
dorianmariefr 5y ago
> $ sh <(curl tea.xyz) Nope
- techthumb 5y ago
  #!/bin/sh set -e if [ -n "$VERBOSE" ]; then set -x fi if [ "$1" = "--show" ] && [ $2 = "twitter" ]; then echo "https://twitter.com/teaxyz_" elif [ -n "$1" ]; then # Hi, I know you’re excited but genuinely, pls wait for release # I added this so I can do CI :/ case $(uname) in Darwin) suffix=macOS-aarch64;; Linux) suffix=linux-x86-64;; *) echo "unsupported OS or architecture" >&2 exit 1;; esac if [ "$1" = "brew" ]; then d="$HOME"/.tea/bin mkdir -p "$d" curl https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-$suffix -o "$d"/tea echo "$d" >> $GITHUB_PATH else mkdir opt curl https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-$suffix -o ./opt/tea chmod u+x ./opt/tea shift ./opt/tea "$@" fi else echo echo "418 I’m a teapot" echo echo "thanks for your interest in tea." echo "alas, we’re not quite ready to serve you yet." echo echo "while you wait why not follow us on Twitter:" echo echo ' open $(sh <(curl tea.xyz) --show twitter)' echo fi
  - dorianmariefr 5y ago
    And a 404 for the macos build https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-macOS-aarch64 https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-macOS-aarch64 Same for the linux build https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-linux-x86-64 https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-linux-x86-64
- z3 5y ago
  you can run and check the script: $cat <(curl tea.xyz) --- #!/bin/sh set -e if [ -n "$VERBOSE" ]; then set -x fi if [ "$1" = "--show" ] && [ $2 = "twitter" ]; then echo "https://twitter.com/teaxyz_ https://twitter.com/teaxyz_" elif [ -n "$1" ]; then # Hi, I know you’re excited but genuinely, pls wait for release # I added this so I can do CI :/ case $(uname) in Darwin) suffix=macOS-aarch64;; Linux) suffix=linux-x86-64;; *) echo "unsupported OS or architecture" >&2 exit 1;; esac if [ "$1" = "brew" ]; then d="$HOME"/.tea/bin mkdir -p "$d" curl https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-$suffix -o "$d"/tea echo "$d" >> $GITHUB_PATH else mkdir opt curl https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-$suffix -o ./opt/tea chmod u+x ./opt/tea shift ./opt/tea "$@" fi else echo echo "418 I’m a teapot" echo echo "thanks for your interest in tea." echo "alas, we’re not quite ready to serve you yet." echo echo "while you wait why not follow us on Twitter:" echo echo ' open $(sh <(curl tea.xyz) --show twitter)' echo fi ----
kodah 5y ago
imo, if you want to fix open source funding then you need to address these problems: - a lot of companies that use open source don't donate to open source - a lot of companies that adopt open source refuse to contribute to it or try to takeover the project - companies will always fulfill bare minimum license requirements at most. At least, they ignore the license completely. - companies ignore any open source which isn't a first order dependency. I couldn't really tell from this page whether this product will somehow address one or multiple of these items.
greybox 5y ago
I wonder how quickly scammers will start monetizing other people's open source projects just because they got there first. [ref] https://www.deviantart.com/team/journal/DeviantArt-Protect-Helping-Safeguard-Your-Art-884278903 https://www.deviantart.com/team/journal/DeviantArt-Protect-H...
floatinglotus 5y ago
I read this and it doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s like that crappy AI bot that writes IT marketing phrases built the whole site.
fxtentacle 5y ago
This website seriously bombed their first impression. Oddly unspecific name? Check. Low contrast? Check. Generic illustrations like all hipster startups? Check. Expects me to trust some random website with a root shell? Check. "Decentralization" & "Governance"? Of course. True crypto bros. "Whitepaper"? You bet. And I still have no clue what specifically they plan to do. It's something about paying for open source, but then again we've seen many unsuccessful attempts there recently.
- fellowniusmonk 5y ago
  As a developer that uses "brew" I am in the target audience, I got almost instantly that this is "homebrew that pays the open source maintainers via cryptocurrency, created by the original creator of homebrew." I do wish they put almost that exact sentence at the top.
  - chrischen 5y ago
    I read about 70% (shotgun style) and did not get that, and I use homebrew.
    - gtf21 5y ago
      Same, I was skimming through looking for some pointer as to what this is, but all I got was that they thought it was hard maintaining OSS (which it is, of course) -- none the wiser as to what it was until the parent comment summarised it.
  - tonyhb 5y ago
    For me it wasn't instant and every part of the copy raised more questions: > The tools that build the Internet have steeped too long. It’s time for a fresh brew. What tools? The internet as in... HTTP? Servers? Caching? LLVM? DNS? BGP? > We’re uniquely placed to have tangible impact on all aspects of software development and we intend to. I'm not sure what this means. Hugely scoped. If I spend a few minutes reading the copy, trying to gauge intent, and interpret what they're saying I get an idea of the pitch. But, not how it works. Not the product itself. It says it "sets my stack up right". I'm not sure what that means given it demo's placing a binary into ./bin. The copy is only a story about payment. But nothing else about how that works. Plus, you're more likely to read the highlights, see stuff about a DAO, and write it off as another fad.
sandstrom 5y ago
An admirable idea, but I'm doubtful it would work. Happy to be proven wrong though. Another idea on this topic: Someone should try an open-source license where any company with more than, say, 500 employees need to pay a small tribute, for example a fixed $1000 / year. Small enough of an amount that any large org could pay for it, and large enough that if you have 10+ large companies you'll get good money from your open-source project. 500 dependencies would be 500 000 a year, which should be sustainable for most 500 employee the company. Don't really know how to enforce it or build an org around it, and there are likely several hurdles to overcome.
- nemothekid 5y ago
  >Someone should try an open-source license where any company with more than, say, 500 employees need to pay a small tribute, for example a fixed $1000 / year. Small enough of an amount that any large org could pay for it, and large enough that if you have 10+ large companies you'll get good money from your open-source project. There are projects out there like this; I would say Unreal Engine is one. However, I wouldn't consider this open source (it's source-available). That said, it's way more likely that someone working at that big company, if the need was strong enough, would just write their own and open source it (and everyone would use that project), or just buy a vendored solution (and in that case, if that company is you, you are now running a company and you also have to provide support; which is no different from how things exist today).
- bogwog 5y ago
  Seriously, most open source projects have a relatively small number of contributors. A license that requires a small fee for commercial users over a certain size is a no-brainer. Proprietary closed-source projects are also commonly priced by customer size. The OSI zealots will attack you for violating some vague moral values, but that’s a small price to pay I think.
- kyle-rb 5y ago
  Qt does something close to this; dual licensed LGPL and proprietary. Generally larger companies would rather pay the license than risk being noncompliant with some confusing piece of the LGPL. (Also certain stuff like the mobile framework is only proprietary.) Although their proprietary license cost is more than 'a small tribute'... Anyway, you could maybe have a tri-license: - GPL/LGPL - small-company proprietary license ($0) - large-company proprietary license ($1000) Although the proprietary licenses mean that despite providing a GPL license, you wouldn't be able to take advantage of outside GPL code. Plus I think you'd need to have any open-source contributors sign away the copyright of their code to you/your project's foundation.
Milner08 5y ago
If this is just a way to ensure donations go to the right place (maybe I do `tea donate` and it splits the donation between the packages I have installed) then that is quite interesting. But Max's blog post has stuff about staking tokens and getting rewarded. Its so poorly explained its almost impossible not to take it as a scam. More importantly, what are they going to have for the average brew user that brew does not have? How are they going to drive people away from brew and over to Tea? Interested to here more, but not putting out any hope for this.
dddddddan 5y ago
Homebrew is such a huge pile of crap: terrible migration paths, constantly removing things, no _easy_ way to pin versions. Nix has already replaced it for me. I'm not getting involved in any NFT stuff, it's all just scams all the way down.
eptcyka 5y ago
I still don't understand what it is that this project is about.
HelloNurse 5y ago
Blockchain technology to add novel complications and failure modes to flaky package managers? I'm afraid it isn't a joke.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
Ignoring the payment bits, I feel like package indexing could be a decent use of a distributed append-only public datastore. You need a list of packages, and new versions shouldn't prevent finding older versions, so an append-only system makes sense. You want to allow anyone to upload packages, not just a blessed list of maintainers, but need to be able to authenticate that new versions were uploaded by the same entity as the previous version, so a decentralized trust system makes some sense. So some sort of blockchain makes sense. On the downside it's almost certainly going to be more expensive, get filled with junk packages made by "maintainers" who aren't the original authors, and cause confusion about which packages are actually trustworthy. Like Namecoin, I think it's a viable use of a blockchain (other than the usual three of speculation, separating fools from their money, and evading laws around money). Like Namecoin, I doubt it'll end up going anywhere because the advantages of the system aren't that big compared to the disadvantages.
- soraminazuki 5y ago
  You need git.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
    Git isn't quite a blockchain, since it's a DAG and doesn't have a distributed consensus algorithm built in, while a "true" blockchain would be a Merkle tree with a built-in consensus algorithm. But it's very close, and by skipping the "coin" part of a cryptocurrency it manages to be far more useful.
- verdverm 5y ago
  You might like Sigstore / Cosign which is seeing rapid adoption. It has an append only ledger for package signatures and does not car where the package lives or how it is distributed. The package and distribution tools are adopting it to help secure the software supply chain.
lewisflude 5y ago
I think this page is poorly phrased given the sheer number of cryto-skeptics in the developer community. I also feel that the page more generally fails to show the benefits of tea over brew, and has a general entitled tone. I can totally understand feeling bitter about the corporate worlds approach to use of open source software, but it's also precisely _because_ some of these tools are open source that they get traction in these environments in the first place. I feel like a open source developer should not expert to be financially rewarded or given a fast-track ticket to career success solely because of open source contribution. However, of course there is more the development community could do to support open source initiatives.
pdonis 5y ago
When did piping curl output to a shell become an acceptable installation method?
- mypalmike 5y ago
  It seemed clever to do such things in around 2010.
- awinter-py 5y ago
  makes sense for homebrew maybe because homebrew is 'the missing package manager' -- you do this for HB because there's no package mgr underneath it's not like npm / pypi are that much better (anyone can post), but at least they have a paper trail. but until we have an open institutional review culture for OSS, everything is dangerous.
  - oceanplexian 5y ago
    Homebrew could have bundled a Mac Installer and signed it, you know, the officially supported and documented mechanism that Apple gives you to install software. Instead they decided to re-invent the wheel, which is going to bite them every time Apple releases some new security or sandboxing feature.
jll29 5y ago
This is all very confusing. Google sent a blanket, the world is unfair - is this going to be a solution to the problem that any complex software relies on the work of thousands of contributors, who would otherwise get NIL? > at a glance this looks like it’s aiming to share funds of big, top-level projects to it’s dependencies Use the blockchain to redistribute tech giant's wealth to the developers of its open source roots? Yes, send the cheques, please!
layer8 5y ago
I read through the whole page and still have no idea of what this actually is and what problems it is intended to solve.
smlavine 5y ago
> sh <(curl tea.xyz) No thanks, goodbye.
- oceanplexian 5y ago
  This. As soon as I see a project do this I immediately nope out of it. I'm not running an untrusted bash script from some random domain.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
eximius 5y ago
I think I know the answer, but I'll ask anyway. What part of this project is improved by using a blockchain? And is that worth the cost?
shreddit 5y ago
I just read a medium article about that, and in short: the inventor? of brew got a child, saw NFTs and realized open source does not pay your bills > maybe web3/crypto will
AbraKdabra 5y ago
Please stop doing this kind of buzzword crap and "tea is a delightful product suite that you will adore." bullshit, give me some real stuff, not false promises.
paxys 5y ago
Max Howell created Homebrew but hasn't himself been involved in its development or governance since like 2012. The fact that Homebrew is mentioned in every line of this project's home page seems to me that he is trying to cash in on its popularity to push a competitor that he can monetize, of course with all the current buzzwords (web3, blockchain, dao) sprinkled in.
harel 5y ago
Homebrew is a mac thing. I know it exists on Linux but it's pointless and impractical to introduce another package management to an os that already has one built in. Tried it, and I will not repeat the experience. So I assume tea is also a mac only package management, just with some crypto br(o|a)nding. Why?
spacexsucks 5y ago
Is this a scam? Dumbest website ever
jake_morrison 5y ago
Apple needs to fund a proper package repository.

89 points by tnorthcutt 5y ago

If this is real, this is horrible news. No thanks, I don't want my package manager on the blockchain.

Massive wall of text homepage, so many "it's secure!" "it helps teams!" "blockchain!" "monetization!" splats, but I have no idea, not a clue what it is or what it does or what it's for.

quanticle 5y ago
As best as I can tell, it's Homebrew, only on the blockchain. Does this help anything? Does this solve any tangible problems? Who knows? The page is so choked with buzzwords, it's impossible to tell.
- JosephRedfern 5y ago
  Huh, turns out it was co-founded by Max Howell, author of Homebrew: https://medium.com/teaxyz/tea-brew-478a9e736638 https://medium.com/teaxyz/tea-brew-478a9e736638
  - slillibri 5y ago
    So I can safely assume that no binary trees were inverted in the creation of this?
    - qudat 5y ago
      Ooo I think the tea is burnt
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Rebelgecko 5y ago
Yeah, it always sets off my bullshit detector when I read 6 paragraphs of platitudes but still have no idea what the software actually does.

romellem 5y ago

These give some more information: - https://medium.com/teaxyz/tea-brew-478a9e736638 https://medium.com/teaxyz/tea-brew-478a9e736638 - https://www.binance.com/en/blog/ecosystem/binance-labs-leads-$8-million-seed-funding-round-for-tea-421499824684903608 https://www.binance.com/en/blog/ecosystem/binance-labs-leads... > Tea controls the graph of open source that underpins all modern digital infrastructure. Packages will be released on‐chain as NFTs with their dependency metadata included. As developers use Tea, governance tokens are available according to their real‐life usage to drive the entire open source ecosystem. ... “We’re not changing the nature of open-source. It’s still free,” explained co-founder Timothy Lewis. “Software wants to be free, but programmers need to be compensated. We’re bringing the creator economy to open source. Our vision is to fix how open-source is funded and create the tools that will accelerate its creation for the benefit of all humanity.” and > We’re moving the package registry on-chain (we’ll use a low-energy proof of stake chain). ... We’re not changing the nature of open source. It’s still free. web3 has enabled novel new ways to distribute value, and with our system people who care about the health of the open source ecosystem buy some token and stake it. Periodically, we reward this staking because it is securing our token network. We give a portion of these rewards to the staker and a portion to packages of their choice along with all the dependencies of those packages.

FridgeSeal 5y ago
> We’re moving the package registry on-chain Oh yes this will definitely result in an improvement of the situation. > Packages will be released on‐chain as NFTs with their dependency metadata included Hello yes, a concept called “DRM” is on the phone and it wants its licence money.
motoboi 5y ago
oh my
- sph 5y ago
  It's like they used all the business jargon words in that exact order to maximise how shallow and vaporware the whole pitch sounds. NFTs, graph, governance token, (not) changing the nature of open source, creator economy, for the benefit of all humanity. Yeah, no.

jdmoreira 5y ago

My BS detector is in overdrive

travisathougies 5y ago

> tech giants accrued fortunes on the backs of people they’ve never thanked, paid or even met. I have a few open-source libraries, and I figure that... since I give them away explicitly for free... there is no expectation of being paid. If one expects to be paid, one should sell their product.

bodge5000 5y ago
I guess theres the larger point about appreciation, with money being the biggest way of showing that. I've heard horror stories about OSS devs getting hundreds of emails a day ripping into them for not working fast enough to fix an issue or implement a feature. It sounds like murder. When I was much younger, I used to be in awe of how OSS devs can do all this amazing stuff, put it with no expectation of compensation, get a wall of critiscm and demands back, and continue working on it stoically without burnout. As I got older, I learned that the burnout is very real and only getting worse. I'm still extremely impressed by any OSS developers ability to keep going [so you should know that at least someone appreciates you ;) ], but it doesn't seem right to me now.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  It's been long known that having a career as an OSS developer is extremely hard. Most people just work on OSS on-and-off, as part of their day job, or a few hours every other day. I treat it as paying it forward for all the tools I use daily.
- travisathougies 5y ago
  > I've heard horror stories about OSS devs getting hundreds of emails a day ripping into them for not working fast enough to fix an issue or implement a feature. It sounds like murder. So... while I don't get 100s of e-mails a day, I do get a good amount per year demanding I implement a feature. I point out that my personal contact details are there (as well as my corporate entity) and that we can be contacted for custom commercial work. The way I see it... OSS is my past-time. The moment there are deadlines you need to pony up

bodge5000 5y ago

This whole thing about how OSS developers should be compensated for their hard work is something I can absolutely get behind, but I'm not sure how this fixes that, or what this even is. It seems to be something do with blockchain? I'd like to say it could be one of the few decent/non-scammy implementations of a blockchain in recent years, but yeh, I can't really say that until I know what it is.

mynegation 5y ago

It is slogan- and buzzword-heavy but my best understanding is that it is a blockchain-based attempt to reward open-source contributors. As an example, lots and lots of software depends on sqlite and curl but their respective authors did not benefit proportionally from their successes. My guess: the idea is to combine dependency information with popularity scores to allow cryptocurrency flow down to the contributors in the same way reputation flows to the most referred links via PageRank. The most important question I see here is how the money is supposed to flow into that system.

spiralpolitik 5y ago
I'm guessing based on the information in page they plan to set up DAO and issue a token. I'm guessing users and developers can then buy-in, with tokens flowing to projects based on usage as determined by the graph stored on the blockchain. At the core if you strip away the "web 3.0" language then it's a decent idea. There is a lot of devil in the detail so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
jrapdx3 5y ago
In the case of sqlite (created by D. Richard Hipp) the software is public domain. Development was funded (at least in part) by corporations. The author isn't expecting payments from "ordinary" users. The author's firm charges hefty fees for consulting services. These are directed at enterprises needing "certified" versions of sqlite. I'm assuming these are companies providing software under military/government contract. So it's an interesting strategy: release sqlite as public domain. The software is used everywhere, so much so it's an indispensable part of the infrastructure. Then when giant enterprise uses it charge huge fees they gladly pay. Hipp is without doubt a genuine genius.

spiffytech 5y ago

$ sh <(curl tea.xyz) Is there a technical benefit to using this versus $ curl tea.xyz | sh

semi-extrinsic 5y ago
Obvs they've paid some graphics designer to say the first one looks cooler, more like a spaceship.
mynegation 5y ago
curl-ing the script and looking at the examples - the goal is to pass the arguments from the same command line into the script that is installed, cached, and run, e.g. "sh <(curl tea.xyz) install Thing"

vapemaster 5y ago

When I read web3 co.'s product/ tech description it almost always feels like some form of tech. literacy gaslighting. I always feel initially like there's something elusive that I'm not grokking b/c I'm not a blockchain zealot. Then I sit back and realize that it's usually because most of the examples I read are trying to solve non-technical problem (attribution, trust, etc.) with a buzzy tech solution all wrapped in a serious bit of speculation. I think there's a lot of room for improvement in the tech of our law, banking, and logistics systems (COBOL--> anything else?), but the kneejerk to some "decentralized" system that needs total but in from it's participants to work actually seems more fragmented and fragile than our current institutions...

api 5y ago

Edit: is Max Howell even involved with this? If not then it's just another cryptocurrency scam trying to monetize someone else's work. Look at: https://brew.sh https://brew.sh The donations link is at the very bottom. If they need money they should put it up at the top the way Wikipedia does and make it a one-click easy thing with an embed that takes things like Apple Pay. I've never been prompted or asked to donate to Homebrew at all.

RL_Quine 5y ago
This basically popped into existence 30 days ago with a discord instance and not a whole lot else. https://twitter.com/mxcl https://twitter.com/mxcl 'ceo @teaxyz_' https://www.binance.com/en/blog/ecosystem/binance-labs-leads-$8-million-seed-funding-round-for-tea-421499824684903608 https://www.binance.com/en/blog/ecosystem/binance-labs-leads... Does look like they just got caught up in making cryptobro scams though.
- api 5y ago
  So here's the problem with this naive model... As soon as they start paying app creators, a bunch of hustle culture shonkwankers will git clone a bunch of repositories and spam a bunch of bogus apps just like they currently do with other artists' work with NFTs. Compensating creators will turn into compensating people who front-run creators and squat names and stuff. "It will be gamed. No exceptions." ... and my own new law: "The Internet is a dark forest." Announcing an opportunity to make any amount of money is the equivalent to announcing your existence in a literal dark forest. You are instantly overcome by tidal wave of spam, scams, and fraud.
  - RL_Quine 5y ago
    NPM has a market force towards people spamming uselessly small libraries, and the result has been obviously extremely poor software. I can't imagine how terrible it would be is you made direct, open financial incentives to do so.
unmole 5y ago

snambi 5y ago

please license brew/tea to enterprises. Most of them are willing to pay for license, if the developers ask for it. It can be opensource, but add some licensable features that company will pay for.

ricardobeat 5y ago
This. At a previous job I ended up writing quite a bit of tooling around installing and updating developer tools, for 1000+ devs. Some things that would have been a very easy sale: - private, managed brew repos - linux support - onboarding / workstation setup via Brewfile - maybe a graphical interface for that - enterprise support plan (would have been handy when `/usr/local/bin` stopped being writable some OSX versions back) Eventually a lot of it moved to NPM via artifactory for the ease of publishing & consumption.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  > linux support What distro are you using that doesn't have a proper package manager? Brew exists precisely because this has been standard for years/decades on linux but OSX hasn't had anything built in.
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    Of course they all do - the desire for good homebrew support (linuxbrew already exists) comes from the ease of writing formulas and scripting in Ruby, it's infinitely easier than packaging for apt / apk. Plus the fact that 80% of developers use Mac, but you can't leave the 20% out in the rain. This is for in-house software, not third party.

pcr910303 5y ago

Hmm, at a glance this looks like it’s aiming to share funds of big, top-level projects to it’s dependencies. And for that, a big component of the project is a package manager… and the whole system is notably designed by the creator of homebrew. Seems like the blockchain is involved to guarantee that the fund sharing happens automatically. I’m almost always doubtful on blockchain projects, but this does feel like something that might have a slightly bigger chance to succeed than other more scammy projects. I’d appreciate a less buzzword-heavy site though. My main objection of this would be that dependencies might start gaming the system though. Would expect a bit more info on this in the webpage.

verdverm 5y ago
Another issue might be dependencies that are not in the system. Does someone else keep that money? Can someone else publish your work to this system and take the money?
- selljamhere 5y ago
  > Can someone else publish your work to this system and take the money? I had the exact same question. What sort of controls will the Tea team have to add/remove packages, or modify owners. And how would this be any different from centralized package managers?
  - verdverm 5y ago
    There's a simple formula for deciding on Blockchain... Does your platform have user created content? If so, you will need a delete operation. Is the technology you use capable of permanent and complete removal of user data? If the blockchain is only for payments, then maybe it is admissable, but there are still further considerations. This whole thing just stinks of web3 BS and another victim of the cult therein.
kelnos 5y ago
Re: gaming the system... If this became popular, I could totally see project X, which depends on projects Y and Z, to start vendoring Y and Z into their X itself, so that when someone else depends on X, X's maintainer gets all the teacoins (or whatever they are) and Y and Z get nothing.

squeeb 5y ago

hbn 5y ago

Do the naysayers have any actual points as to why this is a bad idea, or is it just another instance where people see the word "blockchain" and immediately start calling it bad and high-fiving each other? It seems they're going to be releasing a whitepaper. I'm willing to hear out ideas for how OSS developers could be compensated, especially if it's coming from someone who has already created a successful and well-loved project from scratch.

and0 5y ago
All for compensating OSS devs, and doing so automatically and implicitly via contributors and the packages they built on is a neat idea. But the blockchain. Ugh. Going by the owner's blog, which is a bit more in-depth on his reasoning and less hyperbolic: - Packages will be immutable (no more left-pad incidents) Don't need blockchain for this. Just add a ToS that you can't pull packages from the centralized repo. - Packages will always be available (we’ll use decentralized storage) NPM availability hasn't been an issue, but could be. Blockchain still not needed for decentralization. Anyone who has to download the entire chain... yeesh, gonna be huge. Scaling issue greater than NPM or Github in my opinion. - Releases will be signed by the maintainers themselves (rather than a middleman you are told you can trust) Doesn't seem to be an issue with NPM? When this happens they usually hijack an account or the github. Some sort of token to sign with can also be grabbed, especially shared between maintainers or (inevitably, because no one actually enjoys decentralization) just becomes an automated feature of Github etc. Even then this issue is solvable with NPM, don't need a blockchain to sign releases. - Tools can be built to fundamentally verify the integrity of your app’s open source constitution Don't need a blockchain. I've thought of building these myself for NPM, maybe something to check VCS release tag hash vs package. - Token can flow through the graph (this is re: financing devs) Don't need a blockchain for this, though my inner dev likes the automation.
phphphphp 5y ago
As far as I can understand, the project distributes and measures open-source software usage in order to collect revenue on behalf of the authors. I don’t necessarily think that’s a terrible idea but I can’t even begin to imagine why it needs a blockchain or what a blockchain could offer that couldn’t be achieved otherwise. I release my software as open-source because I am happy for people to use it for free, I don’t fully understand what problem this is solving — most open-source software usage is so widespread because it’s free, the problem is not that there’s no way to charge companies for usage — but it’ll be interesting to see how they set about doing this.

haroenv 5y ago

What the hell is this even?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

armchairhacker 5y ago

This is actually a good idea: something like homebrew or a package manager but with a convenient way to fund packages you use, or donate money to a pool so that widely-used packages are funded, or maybe just pay a monthly fee like $5 like Coil. But blockchain is not the way to implement it. “Every project exists as an NFT.” Does that mean I’ll have to pay roughly $500 (the price to create an NFT in Etherium) if I want to deploy a package? Will I have to pay gas fees to download packages? How will I, with no interest in cryptocurrency, transfer money? Is actually a lot more straightforward to do this centralized without blockchain. There are already projects like ‘npm fund’ whose goal is to create a graph which you can use to figure out how to divide $X among package contributors, and how yo send that money to their bank accounts. If the developer actually cares about funding package maintainers they should realize that blockchain is overhyped and pivot to distributing real money, managing it through something like a PostgreSQL database instead.

IanCal 5y ago
> Every project exists as an NFT.” Does that mean I’ll have to pay roughly $500 (the price to create an NFT in Etherium) He says they don't want to use Ethereum mainnet so no - gas fees may be fractions of a cent. > Will I have to pay gas fees to download packages? Read operations do not require gas.

paxys 5y ago

The hallmark web3/crypto scams is that they will go on for pages and pages throwing in every buzzword under the sun, but will be unable to tell you – in simple words and under 3 sentences – what the product is what what it does.

wnolens 5y ago

Past the marketing, it's all at the very end (though poorly worded): > graph of open source [software] on‐chain creating a map we’ll use to guide value redistribution... compensated without direct payment Perhaps what they mean to say is.. `tea` facilitates a relationship between payer (commercial user of open source) and payee (open source developer of that software) with a smart contract. So.. replace payment processor and middle-man fees with smart contract and gas fees? That's mildly interesting, but I'm not even aware of a "centralized" version of this if it exists so not sure it's called for.

wmf 5y ago
I think Tidelift is the centralized version.

Steltek 5y ago

> Homebrew has been used by tens of millions of creators to build things we all use every day, and yet Max Howell—the creator of brew and co‐founder of tea—was unable to make a living from Homebrew alone. Homebrew is far from the foundations of Open Source or Linux. It mostly serves to prop up MacOS using Linux originated tech and make it a usable developer experience. Everyone says Apple users are more likely to pay for the things they use and that's why developing Mac and iOS apps is so important. So what happened here?

unmole 5y ago
Exactly. Somehow Debian and Arch package maintainers manage to make it work without resorting to Blockchain Bullshit.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  At least for Debian a lot of the mirror operation costs are covered by universities.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

madisp 5y ago

> tea’s decentralization offers tangible benefits to ecosystem security. Every layer of your apps and dapps is signed and verified on‐chain. Users can rest assured that the software they are using is what all its creators intended. In day to day development our decentralization increases reliability (leftpad is a sore memory) and gives developers the flexibility they need to turn inspiration into empires; when a single proprietry vendor controls how your stack is composed and deployed your stack is centralized and under their control. and then sh <(curl tea.xyz) install deno.land ?

SomeCallMeTim 5y ago
Exactly, and: >In day to day development our decentralization increases reliability (leftpad is a sore memory) ...leftpad became a problem when a commonly-used deep dependency was ripped out of the ecosystem. And because npm is centralized, they can now prohibit anyone from causing that kind of damage again, ever. Whereas in a decentralized system where people are pointing at random GitHub accounts? Yeah, they could totally delete the GitHub account (or force-push an empty repo) and cause the same exact problem as leftpad. They are claiming to solve a problem using decentralization that was caused by too much decentralization. And then using Deno as an example install...which has the exact same problem in its ecosystem. Fail piled on to more fail.
- kyle-rb 5y ago
  It seems like he's promoting the wrong aspect of blockchain here; the benefit is immutability. The fact that you can't `npm unpublish` from the blockchain does fit the use case. But you don't need blockchain for immutability, you just need it for trustlessness. And I think in general people don't care about trustlessness enough to deal with the overhead that blockchain requires. Plus the perverse incentives that I imagine will result from having a currency that you need to buy/spend in order to publish your packages.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    You might find Sigstore and Cosign interesting

dorianmariefr 5y ago

> $ sh <(curl tea.xyz) Nope

techthumb 5y ago
#!/bin/sh set -e if [ -n "$VERBOSE" ]; then set -x fi if [ "$1" = "--show" ] && [ $2 = "twitter" ]; then echo "https://twitter.com/teaxyz_" elif [ -n "$1" ]; then # Hi, I know you’re excited but genuinely, pls wait for release # I added this so I can do CI :/ case $(uname) in Darwin) suffix=macOS-aarch64;; Linux) suffix=linux-x86-64;; *) echo "unsupported OS or architecture" >&2 exit 1;; esac if [ "$1" = "brew" ]; then d="$HOME"/.tea/bin mkdir -p "$d" curl https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-$suffix -o "$d"/tea echo "$d" >> $GITHUB_PATH else mkdir opt curl https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-$suffix -o ./opt/tea chmod u+x ./opt/tea shift ./opt/tea "$@" fi else echo echo "418 I’m a teapot" echo echo "thanks for your interest in tea." echo "alas, we’re not quite ready to serve you yet." echo echo "while you wait why not follow us on Twitter:" echo echo ' open $(sh <(curl tea.xyz) --show twitter)' echo fi
- dorianmariefr 5y ago
  And a 404 for the macos build https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-macOS-aarch64 https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-macOS-aarch64 Same for the linux build https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-linux-x86-64 https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-linux-x86-64
z3 5y ago
you can run and check the script: $cat <(curl tea.xyz) --- #!/bin/sh set -e if [ -n "$VERBOSE" ]; then set -x fi if [ "$1" = "--show" ] && [ $2 = "twitter" ]; then echo "https://twitter.com/teaxyz_ https://twitter.com/teaxyz_" elif [ -n "$1" ]; then # Hi, I know you’re excited but genuinely, pls wait for release # I added this so I can do CI :/ case $(uname) in Darwin) suffix=macOS-aarch64;; Linux) suffix=linux-x86-64;; *) echo "unsupported OS or architecture" >&2 exit 1;; esac if [ "$1" = "brew" ]; then d="$HOME"/.tea/bin mkdir -p "$d" curl https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-$suffix -o "$d"/tea echo "$d" >> $GITHUB_PATH else mkdir opt curl https://tea.xyz/dist/tea-$suffix -o ./opt/tea chmod u+x ./opt/tea shift ./opt/tea "$@" fi else echo echo "418 I’m a teapot" echo echo "thanks for your interest in tea." echo "alas, we’re not quite ready to serve you yet." echo echo "while you wait why not follow us on Twitter:" echo echo ' open $(sh <(curl tea.xyz) --show twitter)' echo fi ----

kodah 5y ago

imo, if you want to fix open source funding then you need to address these problems: - a lot of companies that use open source don't donate to open source - a lot of companies that adopt open source refuse to contribute to it or try to takeover the project - companies will always fulfill bare minimum license requirements at most. At least, they ignore the license completely. - companies ignore any open source which isn't a first order dependency. I couldn't really tell from this page whether this product will somehow address one or multiple of these items.

greybox 5y ago

I wonder how quickly scammers will start monetizing other people's open source projects just because they got there first. [ref] https://www.deviantart.com/team/journal/DeviantArt-Protect-Helping-Safeguard-Your-Art-884278903 https://www.deviantart.com/team/journal/DeviantArt-Protect-H...

floatinglotus 5y ago

I read this and it doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s like that crappy AI bot that writes IT marketing phrases built the whole site.

fxtentacle 5y ago

This website seriously bombed their first impression. Oddly unspecific name? Check. Low contrast? Check. Generic illustrations like all hipster startups? Check. Expects me to trust some random website with a root shell? Check. "Decentralization" & "Governance"? Of course. True crypto bros. "Whitepaper"? You bet. And I still have no clue what specifically they plan to do. It's something about paying for open source, but then again we've seen many unsuccessful attempts there recently.

fellowniusmonk 5y ago
As a developer that uses "brew" I am in the target audience, I got almost instantly that this is "homebrew that pays the open source maintainers via cryptocurrency, created by the original creator of homebrew." I do wish they put almost that exact sentence at the top.
- chrischen 5y ago
  I read about 70% (shotgun style) and did not get that, and I use homebrew.
  - gtf21 5y ago
    Same, I was skimming through looking for some pointer as to what this is, but all I got was that they thought it was hard maintaining OSS (which it is, of course) -- none the wiser as to what it was until the parent comment summarised it.
- tonyhb 5y ago
  For me it wasn't instant and every part of the copy raised more questions: > The tools that build the Internet have steeped too long. It’s time for a fresh brew. What tools? The internet as in... HTTP? Servers? Caching? LLVM? DNS? BGP? > We’re uniquely placed to have tangible impact on all aspects of software development and we intend to. I'm not sure what this means. Hugely scoped. If I spend a few minutes reading the copy, trying to gauge intent, and interpret what they're saying I get an idea of the pitch. But, not how it works. Not the product itself. It says it "sets my stack up right". I'm not sure what that means given it demo's placing a binary into ./bin. The copy is only a story about payment. But nothing else about how that works. Plus, you're more likely to read the highlights, see stuff about a DAO, and write it off as another fad.

sandstrom 5y ago

An admirable idea, but I'm doubtful it would work. Happy to be proven wrong though. Another idea on this topic: Someone should try an open-source license where any company with more than, say, 500 employees need to pay a small tribute, for example a fixed $1000 / year. Small enough of an amount that any large org could pay for it, and large enough that if you have 10+ large companies you'll get good money from your open-source project. 500 dependencies would be 500 000 a year, which should be sustainable for most 500 employee the company. Don't really know how to enforce it or build an org around it, and there are likely several hurdles to overcome.

nemothekid 5y ago
>Someone should try an open-source license where any company with more than, say, 500 employees need to pay a small tribute, for example a fixed $1000 / year. Small enough of an amount that any large org could pay for it, and large enough that if you have 10+ large companies you'll get good money from your open-source project. There are projects out there like this; I would say Unreal Engine is one. However, I wouldn't consider this open source (it's source-available). That said, it's way more likely that someone working at that big company, if the need was strong enough, would just write their own and open source it (and everyone would use that project), or just buy a vendored solution (and in that case, if that company is you, you are now running a company and you also have to provide support; which is no different from how things exist today).
bogwog 5y ago
Seriously, most open source projects have a relatively small number of contributors. A license that requires a small fee for commercial users over a certain size is a no-brainer. Proprietary closed-source projects are also commonly priced by customer size. The OSI zealots will attack you for violating some vague moral values, but that’s a small price to pay I think.
kyle-rb 5y ago
Qt does something close to this; dual licensed LGPL and proprietary. Generally larger companies would rather pay the license than risk being noncompliant with some confusing piece of the LGPL. (Also certain stuff like the mobile framework is only proprietary.) Although their proprietary license cost is more than 'a small tribute'... Anyway, you could maybe have a tri-license: - GPL/LGPL - small-company proprietary license ($0) - large-company proprietary license ($1000) Although the proprietary licenses mean that despite providing a GPL license, you wouldn't be able to take advantage of outside GPL code. Plus I think you'd need to have any open-source contributors sign away the copyright of their code to you/your project's foundation.

Milner08 5y ago

If this is just a way to ensure donations go to the right place (maybe I do `tea donate` and it splits the donation between the packages I have installed) then that is quite interesting. But Max's blog post has stuff about staking tokens and getting rewarded. Its so poorly explained its almost impossible not to take it as a scam. More importantly, what are they going to have for the average brew user that brew does not have? How are they going to drive people away from brew and over to Tea? Interested to here more, but not putting out any hope for this.

dddddddan 5y ago

Homebrew is such a huge pile of crap: terrible migration paths, constantly removing things, no _easy_ way to pin versions. Nix has already replaced it for me. I'm not getting involved in any NFT stuff, it's all just scams all the way down.

eptcyka 5y ago

I still don't understand what it is that this project is about.

HelloNurse 5y ago

Blockchain technology to add novel complications and failure modes to flaky package managers? I'm afraid it isn't a joke.

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SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago

Ignoring the payment bits, I feel like package indexing could be a decent use of a distributed append-only public datastore. You need a list of packages, and new versions shouldn't prevent finding older versions, so an append-only system makes sense. You want to allow anyone to upload packages, not just a blessed list of maintainers, but need to be able to authenticate that new versions were uploaded by the same entity as the previous version, so a decentralized trust system makes some sense. So some sort of blockchain makes sense. On the downside it's almost certainly going to be more expensive, get filled with junk packages made by "maintainers" who aren't the original authors, and cause confusion about which packages are actually trustworthy. Like Namecoin, I think it's a viable use of a blockchain (other than the usual three of speculation, separating fools from their money, and evading laws around money). Like Namecoin, I doubt it'll end up going anywhere because the advantages of the system aren't that big compared to the disadvantages.

soraminazuki 5y ago
You need git.
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
  Git isn't quite a blockchain, since it's a DAG and doesn't have a distributed consensus algorithm built in, while a "true" blockchain would be a Merkle tree with a built-in consensus algorithm. But it's very close, and by skipping the "coin" part of a cryptocurrency it manages to be far more useful.
verdverm 5y ago
You might like Sigstore / Cosign which is seeing rapid adoption. It has an append only ledger for package signatures and does not car where the package lives or how it is distributed. The package and distribution tools are adopting it to help secure the software supply chain.

lewisflude 5y ago

I think this page is poorly phrased given the sheer number of cryto-skeptics in the developer community. I also feel that the page more generally fails to show the benefits of tea over brew, and has a general entitled tone. I can totally understand feeling bitter about the corporate worlds approach to use of open source software, but it's also precisely _because_ some of these tools are open source that they get traction in these environments in the first place. I feel like a open source developer should not expert to be financially rewarded or given a fast-track ticket to career success solely because of open source contribution. However, of course there is more the development community could do to support open source initiatives.

pdonis 5y ago

When did piping curl output to a shell become an acceptable installation method?

mypalmike 5y ago
It seemed clever to do such things in around 2010.
awinter-py 5y ago
makes sense for homebrew maybe because homebrew is 'the missing package manager' -- you do this for HB because there's no package mgr underneath it's not like npm / pypi are that much better (anyone can post), but at least they have a paper trail. but until we have an open institutional review culture for OSS, everything is dangerous.
- oceanplexian 5y ago
  Homebrew could have bundled a Mac Installer and signed it, you know, the officially supported and documented mechanism that Apple gives you to install software. Instead they decided to re-invent the wheel, which is going to bite them every time Apple releases some new security or sandboxing feature.

jll29 5y ago

This is all very confusing. Google sent a blanket, the world is unfair - is this going to be a solution to the problem that any complex software relies on the work of thousands of contributors, who would otherwise get NIL? > at a glance this looks like it’s aiming to share funds of big, top-level projects to it’s dependencies Use the blockchain to redistribute tech giant's wealth to the developers of its open source roots? Yes, send the cheques, please!

layer8 5y ago

I read through the whole page and still have no idea of what this actually is and what problems it is intended to solve.

smlavine 5y ago

> sh <(curl tea.xyz) No thanks, goodbye.

oceanplexian 5y ago
This. As soon as I see a project do this I immediately nope out of it. I'm not running an untrusted bash script from some random domain.

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eximius 5y ago

I think I know the answer, but I'll ask anyway. What part of this project is improved by using a blockchain? And is that worth the cost?

shreddit 5y ago

I just read a medium article about that, and in short: the inventor? of brew got a child, saw NFTs and realized open source does not pay your bills > maybe web3/crypto will

AbraKdabra 5y ago

Please stop doing this kind of buzzword crap and "tea is a delightful product suite that you will adore." bullshit, give me some real stuff, not false promises.

paxys 5y ago

Max Howell created Homebrew but hasn't himself been involved in its development or governance since like 2012. The fact that Homebrew is mentioned in every line of this project's home page seems to me that he is trying to cash in on its popularity to push a competitor that he can monetize, of course with all the current buzzwords (web3, blockchain, dao) sprinkled in.

harel 5y ago

Homebrew is a mac thing. I know it exists on Linux but it's pointless and impractical to introduce another package management to an os that already has one built in. Tried it, and I will not repeat the experience. So I assume tea is also a mac only package management, just with some crypto br(o|a)nding. Why?

spacexsucks 5y ago

Is this a scam? Dumbest website ever

jake_morrison 5y ago

Apple needs to fund a proper package repository.