Homebrew (brew.sh) guy has gone full blockchain/Web3 | Hacker News Reader

Homebrew (brew.sh) guy has gone full blockchain/Web3

stackoverflow.blog

42 pointsDemiGuru16 comments

From the launch post on Medium:

” Token flowing is where things get really interesting, but first let’s set things straight: we’re not changing the nature of open source. It’s still free. web3 has enabled novel new ways to distribute value, and with our system people who care about the health of the open source ecosystem buy some token and stake it. Periodically, we reward this staking because it is securing our token network. We give a portion of these rewards to the staker and a portion to packages of their choice along with all the dependencies of those packages.”

Sounds like the reason to buy the token is basically charity. It’s donations to open source, just dressed up in a lot of blockchain jargon.

I’m all for compensating open source developers, but why can’t this scheme work with, you know, actual money? It’s definitely possible to get people to donate to creators. My monthly Patreon bill is several hundred dollars. If a better alternative came along that meaningfully improved distribution to deserving projects, I’d be happy to give it a shot. But I’m never going to buy some crypto token for that.

What percentage actually goes to open source? What percentage is pocketed? Do we know? Usually the purpose of a token is to bag a quick cash out for whomever mints it.

Right? This is even worse because now instead of people getting paid directly they get some crypto coing which may or may not have value, and if you can sell the tokens then people are going to buy in with the expectation to be able to sel it back, which means that the token has to perform, which it can't, as is the case for all crypto.

It’s possible but in practice most open source projects do not ever support salaries.

> but why can't this scheme work with, you know, actual money?

That's something that's been kicking around the back of my mind for some time.

Like, what's stopping the web3/crypto folks from using a distributed ledger for invoicing/billing with traditional money? Why must we try to take down the centralized banking system at the same time?

Strikes me as the most extreme form of scope creep.

Because of the other aspects which could be coded in. You can audit how much people get, you could fractionalise a bug bounty, you cut out the middleman (payment processor), you enable people in poorer countries access to becoming developers.

You’re using patreon who are taking a cut and there’s no guarantee they won’t disappear with people’s money and they rely on the donor not really caring if they get something of value for the money (you don’t have a real recourse other than to cancel).

We’ve recently been discussing a bug in the Qt toolkit, we couldn’t afford to pay for it to be fixed, but we could contribute with other small businesses to get it solved. A smart contract could automate that in a trust-less way.

Back in the 1980s Apple used to write checks to the people who were coming up with the fundamentally important pieces of its eco-system. Bill Atkinson (Hypercard) got money even after he left Apple. The application switcher, the drop down menu: Apple paid individual engineers to get these bits of functionality. If Apple was smart, it would continue to subsidize apps that are central to its eco-system. That includes Homebrew.

It wasnt charity, and Jobs was underpaying while indimidating people. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

"OK, I've seen enough, " Steve interrupted me. "It's great. Apple is going to bundle it with the Mac. Congratulations."

But then he paused, and stared at me for a moment with an incredibly intense gaze, as if he was sizing me up or maybe just trying to scare me.

"But I don't want you taking advantage of this situation. I'm not going to allow you to take advantage of Apple."

"What do you mean?" I asked him, genuinely puzzled.

"There's no way that you could have written that program without confidential information that you learned by working at Apple. You don't have the right to charge whatever you like for it."

I started to get angry. "The program is only half finished, and if I don't think you're paying me fairly, I won't be motivated to finish it."

Steve gave me another intense stare as he paused for a few seconds. Then he stated a single number, without explanation.

"One hundred thousand dollars."

"I don't know," I told him, "I think it's probably worth a lot more than that."

"Don't argue with me. $100,000 is fair, and you know it."

This is a weird headline. To be clear, it refers to "Tea", a "spiritual successor" to Homebrew, and not actually to Homebrew.

https://tea.xyz

This feels like bullying. This person is free to work on whatever they want with their life.

Yeah, the HN post title is sensationalist. I'm not "full blockchain/Web3", but (having not looked at it too closely) Tea seems like a nice idea on paper. Homebrew doesn't seem to have changed or stopped working.

Let him try new things!

The linked page title doesn't come across as derogatory to me, unless I am being naive. It appears the opposite actually, that the writer of the blog is supporting the interest in blockchain/ web3? I didn't (and don't plan to) listen to the 32min audio so maybe I am wrong. I agree Tea sounds like an awesome idea. I look forward to seeing if it takes off.

This seems really silly.

A better system would be for a service like Flathub to support bitcoin Lightning payments direct to app developers.

Obviates the need for the store to handle payment, developers can handle their tax arrangements personally (and exchange into whatever local currency they use almost immediately to protect against price fluctuations).

For 20-somethimg years I've been following this search for Open Source funding. It's kinda like the holy grail, or perhaps more like an attempt at an unholy alliance.

On the one hand you have a primarily communistic enterprise (in the sense that it is developed in community, for community.)

On the other hand it is developed by individuals who answer to no-one, and live in a capitalistic society.

Politically speaking, this sort of public-good is typically govt funded. Like a road or bridge. But that implies govt control - they decide who gets built, by whom, and where and what.

Whereas developers decide what to build, what to add, when, how, and so on.

So on the one hand you have a zillion free agents, just making up whatever they like. (do we _really_ need another text editor, or JavaScript color picker?)

On the other hand we want centralised funding for "open source". In which case who decides which projects are winners and which are losers?

No, no, we should limit funding to individuals and individual projects. If only every Linux user who give $10 a year to the Linux foundation. And $10 to OpenSSL and $10 each to a hundred other projects... Except this model simply doesn't work.

Oh wait, corporations - they have plenty of money. We don't need individuals, we need companies to pony up. How about say 1% if annual profits. But how to share the pot? If I release a fork of jQuery can I get a share?

So we have altruistic developers, most of whom are making complete crap [1], wanting the market to figure out the winners and losers based on quality, and somehow the cream will rise. But the "market" pays nothing, except what ever they want to whoever the want?

I'm slowly losing hope that these two systems can be reconciled. They seem, idealogically, to repel each other.

The very freedoms baked into Open Source and Free Software seem to preclude all efforts to keep software both Open, and profitable.

[1] most-all software is crap, commercial or open source.

I expected the date on that would be at least six months ago but no, it's from 18th November!

bigger earlier discussion about Tea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33681216

Reply on news.ycombinator.com