Max Howell

It's too late.

Oh, there's more, but those are the things that people care about.

Yeah, yeah. It was an important little pointer for me. I appreciate that. Okay. That's all I remember. Yeah, I was trying to do too much. That was what was T-Klee, which we now call Package X. Okay. And... Well, I was very much aware of the fact that homebrew is enormous. And here I was trying to do homebrew 2.0, something I said I'd never do.

And I think Ryan Dahl with Dino is seeing the same kind of problems, right? Once you've had something that's a huge success, how do you make something that is... as big even as that. So you've got this enormous momentum behind the previous thing. So I was very much aware of that when I was building out Teakley.

And so I put too much into it thinking, well, that's the only way I'm going to get people to come on board with it. Right. Right. And you point out quite sagely, I think it made me realize that, yeah, it was doing too many things and that was just confusing. So we whittled it down to just what it is now, which is like an executor for packages.

So you don't think about installing them, you just run them. And that's enormously powerful, actually. I think over the next few years, people are going to start seeing that. Because it's so good for scripting, for example. You can write a package X shebang in your script and then add all the packages you want.

And then you've got a portable script you can just pass around that you don't have to worry about if people have things installed or not. It opens up the entire open source ecosystem to it. So I've got a few things planned to use that. But we realized along the way, this is all part of T protocol, right?

That even though we thought initially we would be putting functionality for the protocol into TKli, actually no that doesn't make sense it's diffusing the messaging once again i think i was a little too influenced by our investors and that's why we went down that path but we course corrected so now we're completely focused on just the protocol which

You know, that was the original vision that I had to build something that could help people who create open source to actually, you know, get some of that value that they create back to themselves rather than just creating value for people who build on top of it.

Yeah, so we've built it. We've been running the testnet since February, and we got 1.7 million people who've signed up to use this testnet, which are pretty great numbers by any standards, but especially in the Web3 space, you don't get that kind of users.

I think it's a testament to people understanding that what we're doing is important, but also that we've cracked it, that we understand how to take the value of open source and actually expose it. So until now, we all understand the value of open source. Everyone builds everything on top of it. But very little of that value ends up going back to the people who maintain it. That's my story.

Homebrew was a passion project that became my full-time job for free. And I had to keep taking new jobs. quitting them after I'd saved up some money working on it. And that's why I founded T-Protocol. I was once again in that position, wanting to work on open source full time. So our system, it changes the economics of open source.

That was one of my conclusions before founding T-Protocol, is that the system of economics that we use in this world, it doesn't fit cleanly onto how open source works. Open source is really weird. There's no real thing that's like it elsewhere in the world. So it was necessary to build something new that used economics in a new fashion. So that's what we've built.

We have an on-chain Oracle called Chai that computes the impact of all the open source projects, all 10.5 million of them.

using package manager data and dependency data to calculate that the higher your impact the higher your rewards every 24 hours we just give you free t token and then we have uh like with the 1.7 million people who signed up only a third of them are developers two-thirds of them are people that maybe didn't even know about open source before once they heard the story

of how everything they've used on the internet for the last 30 years is built on top of this open source. They understood that there's a huge amount of untapped value there that they want to participate in. So they're the input for the monetary parts that allow the open source to be remunerated. And I've had loads of tokenomics experts looking at it over the last three years.

You know, you have to calculate the sell and the buy pressure correctly in order to make it so the token price stabilizes at something, which then makes it so the open source maintainers can sell their token and use it to fund the developers.

Yeah, exactly. It's very important that we do that. Otherwise, it will be a project that just goes whoop and down, as you were saying. Right. And then it hasn't succeeded at all. And that was a difficult problem to solve. We have lots of mechanisms in there that will be there for the launch. We're hoping to launch later this year or early next year.

So it's not live yet. No, but the testnet is, so people can sign up. We have 17,000 open source projects that have onboarded 2T protocol during the testnet. So, you know, we've got good traction. I'm hoping when mainnet goes live, the proof will be in the pudding, you know. People will see that this is something that actually could fix these fundamental issues with how open source is funded.

And it's really a no-brainer if you're an open source project with any clout. Onboarding is free. It's very low effort to do so. Too low effort, as you probably saw some of the negative press we had over the last year or so.