Max Howell, Founder of Tea Protocol, on Unlocking the Open-Source Economy, Measuring the Impact of Blockchains, AI, and Incentivizing Developers | Ep. 319
Max Howell, the founder of the decentralized technology protocol tea Protocol, sat down for a chat with Cryptonews’ Matt Zahab, to discuss his highly popular Homebrew system, as well as the much-anticipated tea Protocol.
He talked about the massive importance of properly compensating developers to create and maintain open-source software so they can work on it full-time, and how tea aims to help that goal.
The famous developer also touched upon commercial open-source, the impossible attempt to merge open-source and capitalism, and what open-source is in its essence.
In this episode, Howell discussed:
You can watch the full podcast episode above or read what Howell told Matt below.
Howell achieved quite a feat early in life.
He told Cryptonews that in the mid-2000s, online music service Last.fm offered him a job.
It was while he was there that he wrote Homebrew in 2009, a free and open-source software package management system that simplifies the installation of software on macOS and Linux. Tens of millions of developers around the world use it.
At Last.fm, the team was using Mac. But at that time, the state of the developer tooling was lacking.
“I came from a Linux background where I was used to all these awesome package managers that had amazing feature sets and worked really well,” Howell said.
So, after complaining about it at the pub after work, he decided to “do something about it.”
Three months later, he open-sourced his product on GitHub. Interestingly, nobody noticed it for a while, so he started “doing some self-evangelism.”
“One day, I woke up and found that I had a bunch of people interacting with my code,” Howell said.
Homebrew has become “a massive success” and quickly. But this created a different career problem. The
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