Tidelift: We Support the Long Tail of Open Source Projects

Tidelift looks to provide support for a broad range of open source projects that don't already have corporate sponsors, as well as provide 'meaningful' income to open source developers.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

January 10, 2019

4 Min Read
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The open source community has mature business models to support big projects like Linux, but what about everything else? Businesses depend on a plethora of open source projects supported by ad hoc teams of volunteer labor. These projects lack underlying business models to ensure ongoing support -- and get developers paid for their work.

Tidelift is looking to solve that problem by contracting with private developers to maintain and secure open source projects, as well as sort through the confusing tangle of licensing to ensure that businesses are using open source correctly.

Businesses, meanwhile, subscribe to open source packages supported by Tidelift.

Tidelift got a $25 million lift for its business model with a Series B funding round announced Monday, led by Matthew Szulik, former Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) chairman and CEO. "Tidelift gives organizations the security, licensing and maintenance guarantees they need for the open source software components their applications depend on," Tidelift said in a statement announcing the funding. Also leading the funding round are General Catalyst and Foundry Group. (See Tidelift Raises $25M for Open Source, Led By Former Red Hat Boss Matthew Szulik.)

Figure 1: Tidelift's Donald Fischer Tidelift's Donald Fischer

Tidelift is concentrating for now on open source code libraries used by software developers, with subscriptions for hundreds of packages available for JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, .NET and Ruby.

Companies -- such as Red Hat MongoDB and Cloudera Inc. -- have mature business models to provide support for a variety of open source projects. These vendors aren't offering access to code -- that code is freely available. The vendors are offering security, maintenance, licensing support and professional services to make the software "professional grade," Donald Fischer, TideLift co-founder and CEO, tells Light Reading.

But most open source projects lack that kind of business foundation, Fischer says. These packages include many development tools core to commercial and open source projects, maintained by volunteer labor without direct compensation.

In Tidelift's business model, organizations consuming open source software pay Tidelift for maintenance, and Tidelift contracts with individual software developers to provide that maintenance.

This is a business model that could get ugly, turning software development into an overworked, underpaid grind, without health insurance or other employee benefits, like working for Amazon's Mechanical Turk or driving for Uber or another rideshare company.

But Fischer says that's not the company's goal; it wants to generate "meaningful" income for developers, even letting some get wealthy for working on the most popular projects.

Tidelift's subscription business model is part of that proposition: Unlike traditional contractor relationships, Tidelift and its developers can solve a problem once, and then charge user organizations individually to apply that solution over and over, Fischer says. "We want to make it possible for open source creators to scale their income proportional to the value and usefulness of the package, and not just for the hours per day they put into their services," he says.

Fischer adds, "Our status quo is that stuff is getting done and the creators are getting nothing. These folks are already creating open source software, and maintaining it to the best of their ability. We're trying to add a new option for them, making it possible for them to get paid for work they're already doing.

Fischer continues, "Our goal is for people to be able to be full-time Tidelift maintainers. As we scale our subscriber base, if you're the maintainer of a single high-profile package, or mid-popularity, you'll get more and more of the income that comes from Tidelift to your package," Fischer says. Alternately, developers can work on multiple packages to generate income.

For open source users, Tidelift provides indemnification and service level agreements to guarantee the work it does, Fischer says.

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About the Author

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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