The creator of Homebrew has a plan to fix the funding problem in open source

<p>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. <a href="https://xkcd.com/2347/">This XKCD cartoon</a> is probably the most frequently repeated joke on the podcast over the last three years.</p><p>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? </p><p>In March of 2022, Max and his co-founder launched <a href="https://tea.xyz/">Tea</a>, 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. </p><p>You can read Max’s launch post on Tea <a href="https://medium.com/teaxyz/tea-brew-478a9e736638">here</a> and yes, of course there is a <a href="https://tea.xyz/white-paper/">white paper</a>. Follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/mxcl">here</a>.</p>