There have been a variety of third-party command-line package management utilities for Mac computers that all really make the Mac’s terminal a good place to get things done with modern packages since Apple doesn’t provide a package management system for the command line like other Unixes do. MacPorts, Fink, and the newest and I think likely to be the most popular is HomeBrew. There are plenty more out there, but those are the ones I’ve used in the past. Some of these package managers can even run on top of other operating systems, HomeBrew can run inside of Windows 10 (and 11’s) Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
Max Howell was the original creator of HomeBrew and has now started a similar new project called Tea, announced with a blog post, Max calls Tea “brew2” and points out the obvious problem of open source software projects not paying bills despite enormous companies relying on open source software and then turns that to Web3 (crypto currency grafting the web with the blockchain grift) as the solution:
While learning about web3 I bought and sold a few NFTs. The process was mostly uninteresting except for when I sold one and saw the automated, unavoidable 10% royalty enforced by a digital contract (with no need for a legal structure) that compensated the original creator for secondary sales. I felt the sting of inspiration.
web3 enables indirect compensation.
I wondered if we could apply this concept to helping distribute value to open source.
The Tea homepage claims that:
Like its predecessor, brew, tea is the base of the developer stack—seated beneath the tools that build the Internet.
This is a terrible mistake. Crypto currency grifters would no doubt love to turn desperate people like open source software developers into suckers to buy in so the grifters at the top of the pyramid can cash out. Fortunately, at least one member of the Homebrew team has indicated that Homebrew has no connection to this pyramid scheme. Hopefully Tea will fail to gain any traction after this initial round of 8 million dollars in the pump phase of the scam. The dump phase could be even sadder than open source developers getting screwed over by the companies that exploit their labor.
Note: All links in this post lead to archive.org so as not to encourage anyone to join the pyramid scheme that is Web3, NFTs, and cryptocurrencies.
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