I haven’t read the details of Tea, but there are a thousand ways that smart contracts, blockchain and cryptocurrencies could help with that.
Yes, be concerned about what further “commercialising” open source means.
But to attack a very interesting incentive and governance mechanism just because it contains the word crypto, and cast aspertions at the Homebrew founder just because he us looking to make a living is shortsighted and unfair though.
Edit - Here’s a silly example use case: Create a DAO (virtual organisation) for all open source project developers. Charge commercial organisations for a license or extension of the open source project managed as an NFT. Any funds from that license are split between the DAO members in perpetuity based on their contributions, incentivising further development and fair compensation. The developer can keep his entitlement to the income or sell it as an asset later on. The trustless nature of Web3 supports the decentralised nature of open source.
Sure there are a million problems with that, but it has potential to accelerate open source and fairly compensate developers no?
What makes open source tick is (a) a culture around freedom on an almost philosophical level (free software movement) and (b) extremely low entry bar for anyone to use and participate. And it works in a way where any type of monetization is hard (it's hard to attach $ value to open source things). I hope I turn out to be wrong, but it's very hard to wire in any $ incentives or routes while keeping it actually open source.
If you want to write software and get paid properly when someone uses it, there is a whole existing industry for this (paid software).
From the Tea website:
> 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.
The money needs to come from somewhere, the only way I can see this work is if you change culture in a way big companies (the only ones that can pay without it limiting their usage) that use open source software are willing to somehow pay money.
Any other type of economic system where people pay for tokens representing a part of some open source project without any cashflow (or future cashflow) is dangerous.
But, there's a lot of hype and excitement around cryptocurrencies. It would be good if it had a positive outcome.
It's easy to sympathise with "I made a library which got very popular, but was unable to make a living from this".
To compensate all of those using micropayments each time they are pulled with transparency and trust at the package manager layer is a super interesting idea.