TEA — a decentralized system for fairly remunerating open-source

tea — a decentralized system for fairly remunerating open-source developers based on their contributions to the entire ecosystem and enacted through the tea incentive algorithm applied across all entries in the tea registry.

tea’s mission is to empower open-source communities and ensure their contributors are supported as they create the tools that build the Internet. In this white paper, we distinguish participants through their contributions. Some may contribute code or verify contributed code. Others may provide economic value to support developers and their reputation.

Package Maintainers

Package maintainers must make sure their software continues to deliver increasing value as the industry evolves.

tea assumes that package creators maintain their work. Package maintainers are pillars of open-source communities who need to be empowered and rewarded for their ongoing contributions. A package maintainer may decide to discontinue their maintenance efforts or realize they cannot operate at a pace that matches the package users' expectations. Package maintainers receive a non-fungible token (NFT) when they complete a package submission (see the maintainer NFT section for additional details). This NFT is used to evidence their work and is the key that directs tea rewards. The holder of a package’s NFT can transfer its ownership to another developer (or group of developers), thus making them maintainers of the package and recipients of any future rewards. Similarly, a developer may decide to take on the role of package maintainer by forking the existing package and submitting a new one which they will maintain moving forward, thus becoming themselves both package creator and maintainer.

It is essential to provide developer communities with the right tools to determine which packages are being maintained and their past and present maintainers’ reputation and quality of work. We’ve too often seen open-source work being tampered with and the efforts of many ruined by bad actors. Although the work of these bad actors is largely discovered and remediated, it is often not until significant damage has been incurred through financial or data loss. Take for example the EventStream npm package16 that was downloaded over 1.5 million times per week and relied upon by over 1,500 packages when a hacker managed to penetrate the open-source project, gain the trust of its original author and modify EventStream to depend on a malicious package that would exfiltrate bitcoin wallet credentials to a third-party server. Although tools may help detect some of these attacks, they cannot always be relied upon, which creates an entire community dependent upon each other’s diligence and willingness to share their findings.

We propose introducing incentives via the tea token described in the tea token section, encouraging open-source communities to report their findings constructively, so package maintainers can address them before they are exploited.

Package Users

Package users are software developers focused on solving a specific problem. They often look in the open-source community for the tools they need to experiment quickly and iterate at very little to no cost, directly benefiting from the work of package creators and maintainers. Traditionally, a subset may have chosen to support package maintainers through donations or other forms of remuneration; however, this has rarely been the case.

Sponsorship can be an effective system to support open-source development; however, remuneration does not typically extend to all dependencies. This limitation benefits favorites and gets in the way of innovation and software building. To strive as the foundation of software development, open-source must empower all developers, whether beginners or experts, across all layers in the tower.

tea’s purpose is to maintain the core values of open-source software while providing a decentralized system to remunerate package maintainers for their work. To deliver on this mission, tea intends to develop — and incentivize others to develop — mechanisms for package users to support package maintainers through unique use cases of the tea token, as described in the tea token and future work and potential community effort sections.

Package Supporters and Sponsors

In Web 2.0 and web3, package supporters have often been called “sponsors.” They are organizations or package users who use open-source software to build their commercial products, philanthropists looking to support the ecosystem, or entrepreneurs looking to fund teams to develop components of a larger system.

tea proposes to extend the communities of package supporters to the entire tea community, whether organizations, developers, users, or tech enthusiasts. tea’s goal is to implement decentralized incentive mechanisms through unique use cases of the tea token for any member of the tea community to contribute to the perpetual sustainability and continuous growth of open-source. Package supporters and sponsors are free to decide which packages or package maintainers they want to support based on their work, beliefs, or any criteria and metric that would influence their decision. Additionally, the support provided by package supporters and sponsors will flow to each package’s dependencies, thus implicitly trusting the package maintainer to make good choices about their stack and using this information to contribute to their reputation.

Provided that the package maintainer offers such service, a package supporter and sponsor may receive a premium support level NFT in return, thus benefiting from accelerated SLAs or more flexible licensing. Additionally, package supporters and sponsors may decide to support packages or package maintainers and automatically redirect all or a percentage of their rewards to incentivize teams to build new open-source software. In other words, packages don’t need to exist for tea to start pouring in. Nascent projects can be supported just as well as more mature ones, further incentivizing a constantly evolving open-source landscape.

WEB:https://www.teabsc.com/

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