Equitable Open‐Source for web3

The tools that build the internet have steeped too long. For the past two decades, big tech has made trillions off the generosity of visionary developers and web pioneers… never thanking, never mentioning, and certainly never paying. At tea, we’re brewing something to change that by enabling developers (you) to continue doing what you love, while earning what you deserve.

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The tools you need to keep on building.

Like its predecessor, brew, tea is the base of the developer stack–seated beneath the tools that build the internet. Unlike its predecessor, tea leverages blockchain and web3 technology to eliminate anonymity and deliver compensation.

WEB2

Thankless tech giants profit from the generosity of open‐source developers.

For more than twenty years the Internet has been built upon the fruits of freely available open‐source. Whenever a project enabled new functionality it was (whether desired or not) added as a new brick in the tower of infrastructure; giving the Internet new powers and capabilities; becoming a new foundation for all the innovations that followed. The maintainers of these new bricks became thanklessly unpaid volunteers.

No Compensation

Developers contribute innovations (bricks) to the tower of infrastructure that serves as a feeding ground for big tech. Their efforts are capitalized on, yet they see none of that profit.

Centralized

Entire stacks are left at the mercy of single, proprietary vendors who control their composition and deployment. This turns the “tower of bricks” into a game of Jenga.

Obligation to Maintain

Open‐source authors are pressured by their peers and the community at large to continuously maintain and update their contributions... again, without pay or gratitude.

WEB3

Blockchain empowers developers to contribute to open‐source while reaping overdue benefits.

The problem has always existed, but the technology to solve it hasn’t. tea facilitates the graph of open source that underpins all modern digital infrastructure. We’re putting it on‐chain creating a map we’ll use to guide value redistribution to the open source that makes the Internet possible. We’re not changing how open source works—it’s still free. web3 has introduced powerful new paradigms that allow value to be compensated without direct payment. Creator economy, meet open source.

Token Rewards

Through tea, open‐source contributors are rewarded with our flagship token relative to aggregate usage and sweat equity. Now, devs are able to monetize their generosity.

De-Centralized

web3 turns the “Jenga” game back into a tower of stable bricks. By putting everything on-chain, we’re ensuring that entire stacks will no longer sit at the mercy of sole developers.

Transferrable

Devs are not obligated to dedicate years to maintaining a single project. Instead, they can transfer ownership to another interested party and move on to creating something else.

What makes it great?

Cross Platform Compatible

Wherever you develop, wherever your CI/CD runs, however you deploy your app, tea is there. We abstract this detail away so you can get on with the work that matters to you.

$ sh <(curl tea.xyz) ci

Your README, blog post or internal install instructions can all use the same, simple one‐liner.

$ sh <(curl tea.xyz) install deno.land

Here, our one‐liner installs deno to ./bin/deno. If tea is installed it integrates with that installation, if not the script just exits; tea itself is not installed either way. We’re happy to be just the transmission layer.

Delightful DevExperience

tea is built with a “it just works” philosophy. It’s our job to set you up for success and then get out of your way so you can work as effectively as possible. Development is hard enough without the toolset being a source of pain as well.

Much like its predecessor, brew, tea is full of delightful touches. You’ll have to try it and see.

Of course delightful also means fast. You’ve got plenty to do and need tools that respect your time.

Designed for tea’ms

Good developers create. Great developers collaborate.

You don’t work alone and neither should the tool that sits at the root of your stack. We’re designing tea to be super great for teams.

tea sets your stack up right and makes working with it a delight so you and your team can focus on building what matters.

Decentralized & Secure

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.

We’re also saying goodbye to centralization at the installation layer. Say hello to native, built‐in “version management”† for every tool in your stack and goodbye to dependency hell.

† similar to tools like rbenv, nvm or Python’s virtualenv.

Open Governance

We believe the open source community needs to direct and control the ecosystem we will help launch. The DAO will be an open, transparent and evolving governance structure where the depth of your contributions will matter more than the depth of your pocket.

Want to Help Us Build It?

Join the team that is both fixing how open source is funded and creating the tools that will accelerate its creation for the benefit of all humanity.

Max Howell, our CEO, created brew. He’s a self‐taught developer, yet has written software used by tens of millions of people. He doesn’t care if you know how to invert a binary tree. If you have a passion for changing the world and have built some cool stuff then why not email us and speak for what job you have in mind?

What’s a revolution without powerful allies?

tea is revolutionizing open‐source by leveraging blockchain and web3 to ensure fairness and equitability for the developers who power the internet. Now tell me, will you answer the call? A shot's been heard around the web, and the tea army wants you to join the cause.