Compensating open source developers: Max Howell of Tea

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy your trusted source for useful and legitimate web free information so you don't fall behind the internet Revolution I'm Jaybird and I believe that web3 is going to change the world that's why we're here to guide the world's top talent down the rabbit hole as you participate contribute and capitalize on the opportunity today I'm super excited to have on the show Max Howell the CEO of T dot XYZ with us to break down open source and how the internet was initially built and what that has led us to is this problem where 95 of software

used on the internet whether it be by major companies like Google or by just a small project a small business 95 of software is using open source code now that's great because that means that we have created this internet that grew exponentially because we developed so much open source but it creates this problem because we are not acknowledging and compensating the creators there's nothing going towards those creators and that is clearly a problem I think we would all agree on and Max is creating a solution to that with his new company T dot XYZ now Max is formally the creator

of Homebrew if you're a developer or a programmer you will know all about Homebrew or Brew which is one of the largest open source projects of all time with tens of millions of users to this day max also worked at Apple where he was a senior developer he himself has built a lot of Open Source Code which the internet is built on his code has been used by Google his code is being used by square and for his accomplishment it's for his contributions to the internet Google sent to a blanket and I and square sent him an iPad so he knew that he needed to figure out a way to get compensation

flowing to these developers that are building this essential infrastructure layer of the internet which is what hit made him want to found t.xyz so you're going to love this conversation we also in the end talk a lot about Ai and Max's views around AI which are fascinating so make sure you stick around all the way to the end it's a great show for you today before we jump in though let's just take a minute to hear from our sponsors who make this show possible the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all

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industry plus we at Webster Academy will attend it hosts a community Meetup with you in the other smart Community before the main event so come along meet us Network and start building alongside leading web 3 innovators we can't wait to meet you remember Lisbon Portugal 9th of June we've got a 15 discount for you but ticket prices go up every few days so get your tickets today by using the link in the show notes and to to the promo code web3 Academy 15 to secure your spot or if you become a pro member you can get an even bigger discount so GoPro today and we'll see you in Lisbon Portugal the 9th of June at the Epic web 3 conference Max welcome to the show so

excited to have you today thanks for having me here I've been really looking forward to this episode because you come from a different world than I do different world than many of our listeners you know your background is deep in the development of the internet you're a builder through which we are very grateful for all of that so thank you and it's always interesting to get the developers point of view because you guys see things first before the rest of us you know you're at the beginning starting block first to build the foundational layer of the internet and slowly you know over the last few years you've taken a big leap into web 3 and so excited to learn all about that but let's start back at the beginning of your web 3 Journey how did you first fall down down the rabbit hole and what

caught your attention what got you into the space I have a friend uh Timothy Lewis who I met in Chicago in and like three from Team maybe he fell down the rabbit hole much earlier than myself and he's been trying to get me into it for years I remember him calling me up and say hey Max is this new thing ethereum like you can do civility contracts for 500 bucks an hour I know it's a really eager to get me into it but I never found it like that interesting I gotta be honest like are we going to web 2 when it was new and then I rode that wave up and it was really exciting and fun and it felt like everyone was saying it's stupid until they stopped saying it because it was everywhere but then um Timothy yeah like call me up again you

need to be starting this Dow and he wanted me to participate so I started diving in there like got involved in his Dow and then I uh looked at all everything else that was going on in the sector like I remember it was a couple of months where I was just vivaciously like consuming information on the everything that had happened that I hadn't been paying attention to and it was during all of that that I had the idea for what is now my adventure Funding Company t as a builder and a developer you've seen and you've been part of as you said you know web 2 you've been part of the creation of the internet and you've seen how important open source is to building the internet and I guess I'm guessing that maybe this

is what led you to get jaded and what led you to not want to participate and maybe to leave and to try other passions or maybe I'm wrong maybe you can correct me what happened that led you to get jaded and what was it about web3 that made you say oh yeah this is why I wanted to do this in the beginning oh you're right I don't really feel about it but it's just true like I got into Tech through open source because I did a chemistry degree I thought I wanted to be a scientist well I got into programming via open source I saw lyrics on my computer after deciding that I was Fed Up the chemistry and that I discovered the open source communities that were there I've discovered all these really neat little communities of people who were working on things not

because they wanted to get rich but because they cared about what they were building we're trying to change the world in some way or maybe not in a big way maybe in a small way but sometimes in big ways and sometimes you didn't know how much of a difference you really make all these communities and these people are building open source code and have been for a while how does open source code for a non-developer how is this shared how do other people use it and maybe this actually leads in nicely to the way a lot of your code has been used in the creation Internet it's been used by Google it's been used by square and when they use open source code do you get compensated you get acknowledged for that are they just stealing it or taking

it the history of Open Source is somewhat interesting like initially right it started with the creation of Unix and probably other things around there which weren't as famous uh that was just a bunch of people in a university somewhere who wanted to build the tools they needed to get their other jobs down until the job that they liked best was what they were writing and then that became their job and this is where how it usually works for open source devs but the thing they build becomes way more interesting than whatever they were trying to do with it there's always a reason they're building the thing well it was the same with me in Peru I was building Brew because the job I had we needed something like brew and I kept

complaining about how the fact that this thing we needed like proved didn't exist until one of my co-workers challenged me to build it so I did and uh and it turned out to be huge in the end nowadays people say 95 of all software is open source is probably true so like you know over the last 10 15 years I'd say open source became like a beer moth and those of us who were building at the time when it's it made the shift found that our stuff was being used everywhere companies made massive amounts of money out of the open source software that exists this was a gradual process so there was no like real thinking at the time about should these people be paid like we did it for

free right we did it out of the goodness of our own Hearts what I'll show you guys that I put tens of thousands of hours in timebrew and it did become something that I didn't feel I could give up because I thought I owed everyone who was using it something just for our listeners can you explain Homebrew quickly so everyone understands Homebrew because you haven't mentioned in a few times and I want to make sure it never stands well 100 Brew what was uh just a piece of software I started running in 2009 well it's just a package manager right I always say it's just a package manager but the thing about package managers is that every software developer needs one if they don't use package manager then they're narcissists okay and so for us non-dense what's a package manager so it basically just installs and updates and uninstalls and

manages the configuration and like allows you to do a few more things on top of the packages and packages of projects they're just bits of Open Source software it's not sexy but it does but it's essential it turned out with Homebrew I wrote one that just fixed enough of the issues all the other ones had and had enough like neat little features and ideas and things in it that it took the community by storm and uh it became very popular very quickly and nowadays yeah it's extremely well used there isn't many people who Dev that don't use it yeah embarrassingly successful honestly let's see you shouldn't be embarrassed

good for you it's great you deserve all the credit for building something that's so useful okay so you left home brew you took some time off you got jaded you did you work you know tried out another career in teaching we won't go down any over on that path of how that was but I'm sure that was his own adventure and then you got pulled back into web 3 and you decided okay there's a better solution to funding open source projects and to rewarding or rewarding is actually the wrong word to acknowledging and compensating these devs that are burning out and are putting their life's work into this essential infrastructure and that putting words in your mouth that led to the creation of T dot XYZ

you can jump in here and tell your side and your version of the story yeah I stopped working on The Homebrew a lot probably like 2014 2015 or so and I passed it into the community that emerged the currently maintainer is he was a friend and he got involved with the project and then he was more interested in like the maintenance side of it than me so I just you know I've always started making new things so this is really that true for it so you know I never thought I'd make another one another Brew people would ask me you're gonna make another Brew because like they had issues with it and like I agreed for their issues and you know the mature stuff software tends to stagnate no offense to the people who you know a lot of people who really work hard on Brew nowadays and

for free mostly still you know hembrew has sponsorship they have like a couple of hundred grand in the bank that doesn't try in one salary no but one person maybe yeah one maybe there's loads of people packed promoters need a lot of people because there's a hundred million open source projects right including all the versions so that's a lot of things to like package together and make function and a lot of different expertise oh sorry yeah I never thought I'd make another one but then when I got into web free I have this lightning bolt moment late at night after I'd smoke some weed and uh I saw the the potential because the package manager understands the entire opens will stack all the dependencies all the connections which packages are the most important which

ones need the most maintenance costs and uh as a result I could see how I could build a page manager on top of web free take and then effectively try to remunerate open source in a fair and useful man not like just throwing money at the whole thing but throwing it at the places where it counts also flowing that token through it correctly most projects are sponsored say what I call the top of the stack they're the favorites the things that people know about but open source is like this Tower of blocks Brits should we say plus it's not a good word for blockchain relation topics my bricks I can that have been

built on top of each other so in the last 35 years open source has gradually become like so enormous all these blocks bricks stacked on top of each other and like the stuff that's lower down nobody knows about I understand that you're going what you're doing as you said this slow down approach where each Lego piece or each brick that's being used is getting its fair share where is that share coming from is that coming from T or is that coming from sponsorship on teas level or donations and then how are you deciding who it goes out to and how it goes out to them how is that distributed it's going to be a sale token at some point anyway we're going

to give out a bunch to open source divs so people will choose to stake again packages and well I'm hoping it's also going to be larger companies at some point anyway like the open source Community will the community in general will put pressure on these companies that are making so much money using their open source to put their money where their mouth is because now we've created a actual automation layer for correctly Distributing Monies to the projects that you depend on if you use tea it will tell you like which projects you're using so you just feed that into the smart contract that you're using and like it will stake against the top packages and then every stakey pork will give out some rewards some to you for

staking and some to the packages that you're staking against probably a more significant percentage towards the ones you're staking against so you know in a way it's still like a donation model but what we're building is effectively an economy built on code and we want the token value to represent like the value of Open Source and for people to start building D5 products on top of that we actually have a number of very interesting ideas that we're going to float with the community later when when we're live so that they can start building out those things but it should be a good utility case essentially where people are building D5 products on top of these intrinsically valuable properties open

source is tremendously valuable it's just that we haven't found a way to actually directly correlate that in the apartment with tea we're hoping that that's what's going to happen T sounds more like a public good to me how does t make money what's T's business model so you know the protocol is going to be spun up as a dow Swiss Association associated with it so the you know routine like will hand that over and not be participating we're not going to take percentage of like the token Rewards or anything like shady like that obviously T Incorporated is going to keep a bunch of the tokens so that will help us like keep funded for a while but I have a bunch of like Revenue models using the

token to a certain extent but yeah no actually go into it I don't think I've come to about it publicly before but we're releasing like this graphical complementer so we've already released the package manager this in November because 6 000 Stars trended a few times lots of passionate users coming along tens thousands of people actually using it already so that's the terminal tools in the terminal so uh developers love the terminal not all developers love the terminal that's certainly become more and more true as the software industry is like doubled and couldn't pull them 10x 100xed in size over the last 10 15 years but it's very useful tool but yeah it's not for everyone so the idea of making a graphical complement is always

in my mind also I used to receive emails from people who weren't developers who used Homebrew because there's some things in the open source ecosystem that there isn't an equivalent for there's no like crappy web 2 portal that does some of these things or it's difficult to make a spreadsheet or a date like something like most of access database type thing to doing so they needed these things and these were odd cakes and Sciences and things so the idea of making a graphical program is always there but over time we've realized that it's effectively like a kind of app store for developers and so we want to build like um stool like functionality on top of that and we will take a percentage from uh sales and services on that explain to me more when you say it's like an app store

for developers it's the front end to getting all those little pieces of software that you need that's a different right and really it's the open source ecosystem so saying it's an app store for developers is kind of the way I managed to pitch it to the investors right to get them to put money in like having defenses of them well the truth is it's kind of just like an independent App Store built on top of the fruits of Open Source and so much awesome utility in there I'm curious what are you seeing from like a macro level in web 3 what are most people focus on I shouldn't say people what are Builders what are developers focused on are there any trends that you're seeing what I really like about but now now the last ball

cycles of diet and we're back in their cycle again is that it's back to the people who just care about the tech I just met people that were building cool Solutions on top of web free tag are believed in it as a future who would work in it if there wasn't any money in it they would just be working in it because they're excited about it and that really reminded me of how it was like when I got into Dev in the first place I got into it by open source and then first company I worked out you know then I thought there was any money in that stuff we were trying to build something cool and hoping that you know the company would figure out a revenue model at some point so we could continue to exist that was the vibe I got people were more

interested in the utility of what we're building again is there anything that people are not focused on building or developers are not putting attention to that you wish they were putting attention to yeah I wish there was a bit more emphasis on some decentralization technologies too many of them are obsessed with blockchain and I get it and their Bluetooth is awesome to be cool but it's not the only solution for decentralization and we need more varieties of that stuff and I've been actively looking through the open source ecosystem to try and find these things so I can like Spotlight them highlight them maybe even build some stuff on top of them all right AI is incredibly popular right now and what upsets me about what's going to happen with AI is

how centralized it is because you need billions to possibly even billions of dollars to afford to build that model to train right that model so in a way that's possibly good because we're worried about AI risk but at the same time it makes it a less interesting thing to participate in for all open source type people all developers who want to be on The Cutting Edge on web3 is way more insane because there's Community there there's blood wrong community in AI it's just a bunch of people using the open AI API and then re-implementing various different kinds of chat bolts mostly at the moment it's amazing how many open source projects I've seen that have come out I've been like you can have chat GPT in

your terminal or whatever it was a very light that wrapper around the open AI API right it starts with the AI is on your computer right um and so like stable diffusion managed to make a model that fits on your computer and anyone can use but they needed millions of dollars of VC to do that right because you still got to train the thing so we really need a decentralized model builder much like seti was you remember that like folding it home like these no what we said it is yeah these were screens setting was the search for extraterrestrial intelligence I believe I think the company that released it was called seti perhaps I don't know but it was a screensaver and it crunched all the data they had

because what they had was too much data and not enough computation so you could download the screensaver and then when your computer wasn't doing anything it would be used for invitation to try and find aliens and though sadly I don't think they ever really got much out but it was a great idea right it's a great idea people weren't using their computers anyway yeah and building a home was the same but for figuring out the folds of protein so I did do a bit biochemistry so I shouldn't be able to express it better than that but yeah it's complicated from the Google recently claims they completely solved with AI but yeah this was years ago and so it was the same you were doing something good with your spare CPU Cycles oh yeah using a bit more electricity than it would be otherwise

but people felt good about it so we need something equivalent for building these models otherwise we're leaving it up to these companies to have all the power and all the control there where are the decentralization and Technologies appropriate for that use case I wish the the web free community was more passionate about that they are but they're mostly passionate about the blockchain I like it yes you make a token and you can do a lot with that that's the right token yeah it's interesting to consider because before we hit record you and I were talking about this spectrum from centralization to decentralization as you said in the case of AI you need centralization in

the beginning because you need so much funding and you need so much money and so it's very difficult for a decentralized project to raise that level of capital and then also go execute and spend that capital and distribute it in the right ways and agree on it and so you know in your case your goal is decentralizations for T but you started centralized with VC backed funding because you knew that was a faster way to get to your objective of fast you know so I don't know if that brings up anything for you but it's an interesting conversation well you know like I've realized since we raised the money the maybe we could have just gone with a token sale right well I live in America I'm an American

citizen but obviously British originally it's Shady nowadays which is unfortunately understand why the US was there reasons so maybe not I know we were talking to Carl samani at one point because most common were sniffing around and uh he was like you should just do a token that was his take so maybe you know maybe we could have the truth is I didn't know enough about it and if you get there's more to VC funding than the money like I've got so much great and voice from my investors they really care about what we're doing and they've introduced us to like some amazing people as a result so yeah the truth is like maybe we could have done it without it but it's been faster because we started with this centralized money

and well also like the package manager is kind of centralized right now in terms of development it's way faster to start centralized and then when you figure it out then decentralized if you start off decentralized I think you're asking for it to be a slog that you might not get through Dev is tricky now you've got to do it fast but not too fast and you've also got to make sure that you're not slowed down by certain technical decisions too much yeah well and I've spoken to several leaders of Dao's who over the past year partly as a result of us moving from a bull market to a bear market and then you know not having the same level of funding and their tokens dropping they had to shrink the size of their teams and as a result

they became more centralized but also a lot of them talked about how they sort of needed to become more centralized index Coupe went through this Bank list out went through this clemada went through this where there was a real struggle and a real challenge to the speed of execution that you can have with a smaller team versus a bigger team there isn't this road map or this Playbook yet for how do you build in a decentralized way and continue to build and so what has happened is a lot have gone back to centralize get small get lead make quick decisions and then move back towards decentralization yeah yeah

well we want to believe that it can be completely decentralized but then when it goes wrong like who's gonna yeah open source in a way is like the original kind of Dao and yeah I keep saying I dominated homebrews development for the first two to three years with an Iron Fist and that was essential to make sure that it was set on the path that it then was hugely successful for years without me being nearly as active I was part of another Dao and like eat had like issues that just couldn't be solved because of the way that the governments were set up initially and then there was no like get out of jail card for it right include so yeah we're definitely still learning how

to do these things and I'm going to be super careful with how we set up the tea gal because for me this is something that just cannot go wrong yeah t fails then we're letting down all these people that need you to succeed so that they can earn a living from their open source yeah okay I want to go back to you mentioned Ai and I know you give a TED Talk a couple years ago about how you learned to stop worrying and how to love AI do you love AI are you worried about AI I have a feeling um my talk was deliberately positive because I wanted everyone to go away feeling like it was all right but I didn't really feel that positive search so I did this talk like five

years ago or so and uh it's because you know when I was a kid I I believed AI would be with us like in no time and it would be amazing and then we all went through the AI drought where actually we discovered the intelligence is a lot more complex and difficult than we realized and then suddenly we found out that actually we need is fast enough computers and enough RAM and so while researching the the talk here I read all the material like super intelligence by bowstrom and all the uh sort of discovered Rocco's basilisk which you should never look up if you haven't do not look at all and all these other things I became like worried certainly you know we wouldn't be able to control it like the example I used in my talk was an ala applied to Wall Street and I

was tasked with accumulating as much money as possible so it then accumulates like all the money and then uh you know obviously the global economy would collapse because no one entity can have the wealth and I thought that was you know if any good example because like it's not like Terminator right it's it's not like a science fiction movie where he hates us yeah that's possible it'll hate us but it seems more likely it would just be I'm aligned in some like trivial way and then it's not human so we can't figure out how to stop it but I've become more confident honestly over the years because I saw that the people doing the AI research and targeting these things so heavily towards humanistic Pursuit and incorporating human data to such a

huge extent a Chad gbt's built on all of human knowledge from got from the internet so it just can't not be human really in the way he behaves that's all it knows I've become more confident that whatever happens you know who knows how quickly this is going to happen and I follow a bunch of people on Twitter I think it's going to be tomorrow and a bunch of people think it's going to be 20 years I asked my friend who used to work at deepmind what he thought I asked him four years ago when I did my talk and he said oh Max we're nowhere near anything like that like we don't even understand how we could get there and then I asked him like a few weeks back a month after church gpk was released he was like six years yeah I agree I think I mean in open ai's

case it's built on top of all of human knowledge so how could it not be human at its core but also you know I think I'm excited about the the potential of what AI allows us to do in terms of becoming more productive becoming more in tune with ourselves because you have something that is so intelligent that you can directly have a conversation with and you can learn from us it's really cool isn't it it's yeah it's incredible I hope all of our listeners out there are playing around with it because well I hope so as well because let's face it if you're not ahead of this curve then you've got a good chance of being replaced by it yes like just

this morning I sent my designer the link to the product that is a plug-in for figma that you just type in what you want and it draws it for you in figma and I was like I'm not sending this to you because I'm going to replace you I'm sending you can you see you can stay ahead of this all right yeah I wanted him to be one of the three percent of people that it was there so early that they still are you know fine going forwards and then so we're taking advantage of that right well I use chat gbt and co-pilot Google GitHub co-pilot uh to write a lot of code now you know anyone who's not risks falling right here's the truth it's not that you will be fully replaced it's that you can learn how to make it a

part of what you do if you use it now because if you use it now you actually become more valuable you become faster you can do things much quicker and you'll stay ahead of the curve I mean we've been talking about it on our team as well you know how we can use it in helping with our content creation whether it be for the podcast whether it be for a newsletter and in any way we use it we're not asking the eye to do something and then going and Publishing that right away there is still a human involved but we are becoming better at what we do because we use it right and it's not just efficiency and speed it's also just you know it's a smarter more knowledgeable person involved right they

have all of the they have access to all the knowledge on the internet I don't have access to that at the tip of my you know that can't I don't know all that stuff it does have all of it I believe that we will be replaced eventually in the meantime if you want a career then definitely stay on top of it I think there might be a lull in how it I hope so anyway because you know it's going too fast yeah like it would suck if like ever all dreams were just like suddenly irrelevant I don't think it will destroy us maybe not positive in terms of like how much of our jobs it's going to replace I love the way that it's coming after

programmers first you know because three years ago I remember having a tweet discussion about this and people were like they'll replace like the mundane Jobs first you know stuff that's easy I was like nah it'll be programmers first and my rationale was as programmers we're always trying to replace ourselves as soon as we write something and it becomes tedious we write a script to automate it away so the people writing the AI was my rationale would want the AI to write itself so that you know they could get there faster and do things faster so obviously it was going to replace programmers first and here we are yeah kind of is although I guess it's kind of replaced Sun Cozart first yeah you know there's Danny Postman who

released a modeling agency the the other day where you upload your headshots they can create uh either review or of your products with you know AI generated models holding them unexpected for a lot of people how it's emerging soon as somebody I never predicted that the way we'd initially be using it was more like a replacement for Google how bizarre though I didn't think of that really with hindsight right so it seems so obvious yeah but Namaste it which is why it's still scary right because yeah I don't know anyone who predicted how AI would emerge and what use cases it would have that's certainly not generating images as well

as like the major things that exploded into the mainstream with we all thought that was vastly more complicated than yeah chat gbt for example yeah completely it's exciting and maybe a little bit skew Creek at the same time Max this has been a great conversation uh before we wrap up today I just want to give you a chance to tell people where they can find you online where they can learn more about txyz and anything else that you might want to Shell oh yeah so T dot xyz's uh address we've got a packet manager out it's better than Brew because I may brew and I knew how to make something was better it's actually really magical and lovely and everyone who uses it is like wow and that's that's the thing I always go for

with the product so mate I want the people using it to go wow I wanted to might be so much better than what they thought it could be so it's really good go and check it out and you can sign up for our mailing list so you know when the protocol comes out and when the GUI comes out and you know I participate with this like we've got all these packages to make and there will be token rewards for people who submit packages as well as obviously token rewards if you just do open source in general like if you're a source developer like please come and check out our stuff join up sign up I might start spreading the word about what we're doing because that's how it's going to make it so that you can get a paid a good salary for the important work that you do I love it I

love it well Max thanks so much for joining the show today it was a pleasure to have you and we'll look forward to uh following tea and see you guys launch later this year great well thanks very much thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 Journey if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you

friends and see you in the next one