tea, a company building an Open Source software platform on the blockchain, is pleased to announce the appointment of co-founder Max Howell as Chief Open Source Officer and the return of co-founder Timothy Lewis to take the helm as Chief Executive Officer. Together, Howell and Lewis are setting a new course that seeks to honor and elevate Open Source development as tea develops a decentralized technology framework secured by reputation and incentives that enables Open Source developers and maintainers to be rewarded for their software contributions.
Vision for Open Source: Honoring the Past, Building the Future
tea’s vision is rooted in honoring the past, present, and future of Open Source. Recognizing that each piece of Open Source software has contributed to the Internet we know today, Howell and Lewis aim to address systemic issues within the Open Source community. Reflecting the Open Source community’s strong support for these needed changes, 1.7 million users have signed up to participate on tea’s Testnet since February 2024.
“Open Source has to change,” Howell explains. “The current incentive structures aren’t aligned with the community’s values. We’re seeing fewer younger developers getting involved, feeling frustrated that their contributions drive immense value for others with little coming back to support the community.”
The Launch of CHAI: A Universal Open Source Ranking Solution
This vision is already coming to life through tea’s latest innovation, CHAI—a groundbreaking Universal Impact Ranking solution recently announced at the All Things Open Source conference. CHAI is the first Open Source ranking platform of its kind, powered by verified data and package manager-agnostic, that shines a light on the true impact of Open Source projects. The first public release is entirely Open Source, offering value directly to the community independent of onchain or crypto elements, underscoring tea’s dedication to a genuinely open and accessible ecosystem.
Key features include:
- Universal Open Source Ranking: CHAI provides a comprehensive ranking of Open Source projects across all package managers, delivering unparalleled insights to help developers identify essential tools and dependencies.
- Transparent, Verified Data: By consolidating usage statistics and dependency importance, CHAI offers a clear “point of truth” that developers can rely on to make informed decisions about projects that are valuable, secure, and actively maintained.
- Revealing Hidden Dependencies: CHAI exposes and ranks dependencies that often go unnoticed but underpin much of the ecosystem, offering insights up to two levels deep into project dependencies.
- Enhanced AI-Driven Development: CHAI’s data has the potential to help AI systems more effectively utilize secure, high-impact resources, fundamentally changing the way software is developed.
Through CHAI, tea is building a universal graph of Open Source packages, connecting package managers across platforms such as NPM, PyPI, and Homebrew to deliver a panoramic view of dependencies, relationships, and contributions. This includes a comprehensive database, pipelines for data extraction and transformation, and an API to query the graph, giving developers a new level of transparency in the Open Source world.
“With CHAI, tea brings developers a transparent way to understand and leverage Open Source like never before,” said Lewis. “Max and I are united in our commitment to creating a more equitable Open Source ecosystem. Offering tools like CHAI and redefining tea’s approach to Open Source stewardship are essential steps toward an Open Source future where contributions are recognized and rewarded.”
Those interested in building the future of Open Source should join tea on Discord.
About tea
tea Inc. is building the open source toolkit that makes development possible and builds the internet. Developers can work on any platform, CI/CD on any platform, deploy on any platform; tea abstracts this detail away so developers can get on with the work that matters. Those interested in joining the team fixing how open source is funded and creating the tools that will accelerate its creation for the benefit of all humanity should reach out on Discord or GitHub.
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