New business model for open source pays creators to maintain and secure thousands of projects vital to professional software development teams
Tidelift today announced $25 million in Series B funding to accelerate the adoption of its new business model for open source. General Catalyst, Foundry Group, and former Red Hat Chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik co-led the funding round.
Tidelift gives organizations the security, licensing, and maintenance guarantees they need for the open source software components their applications depend on. The heart of the solution is the Tidelift Subscription—a single source for proactively maintained open source components, professional assurances around those components, and a software platform to track them.
The Tidelift Subscription is backed by the people who know these software projects the best—the open source developers who create and maintain them. Tidelift subscribers are assured that the thousands of critical open source packages their businesses depend on are maintained to a professional-grade standard, while participating open source creators are directly paid for making that possible.
“We’ve reached a crucial turning point for open source,” said Tidelift co-founder and CEO Donald Fischer. “Heartbleed, Equifax, and the recent spate of open source supply chain attacks are all symptoms of a systemic under-investment in maintenance of widely used open source packages. The stakes are now too high, and it is no longer an option to accept the status quo. Tidelift has built, and now we’re scaling, a model that pays open source maintainers to do their important work even better by connecting them to the many software development teams who rely on their contributions.”
“Discourse has become a Tidelift subscriber not only to benefit from professional-grade assurances around software that’s integral to our business, but to constructively partner with the individuals who create those packages,” said Erlend Sogge Heggen, VP of Community at Discourse. “Paying the maintainers is something we know is effective, and it’s also an urgent priority for our business, since it ensures the technology we rely on is maintained and dependable.”
Momentum behind new business model for open source
In September, Tidelift announced it had over $1 million committed to pay maintainers for providing a standard set of security, maintenance, and licensing assurances around their packages. Hundreds of packages have since been added to the Tidelift Subscription, across the JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, .NET, and Ruby language ecosystems. An estimated 35 million of the most commonly used open source repositories are now dependent on packages that are included in the Tidelift Subscription.
Tidelift’s new funding will allow it to further deepen its already extensive coverage of open source projects, while expanding to include additional open source communities.
“Tidelift is filling an unmet need by connecting organizations that rely on open source with the maintainers who create the components they use every day,” said Larry Bohn, managing director at General Catalyst. “The approach is working because it addresses acute pain points for both creators and users of open source and brings those groups together on a common business and technology platform.”
Ryan McIntyre, co-founder and managing director at Foundry Group, commented: “Tidelift has built the first marketplace that can help organizations productively engage with open source software creators at scale. Based on the clear market demand for the Tidelift Subscription, we’re thrilled to support its rapid growth and to create opportunities for more maintainers to join the movement.”
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See how the Tidelift Subscription works
Read more about how software development teams accelerate their open source development with the Tidelift Subscription
Learn about how open source maintainers can get paid for their work
About Tidelift
Tidelift makes open source work better—for everyone. Through the Tidelift Subscription and in direct partnership with maintainers, Tidelift is a single source for proactively maintained open source components and professional assurances around those components. Tidelift makes it possible for open source projects to thrive, so we can all create even more incredible software, even faster. For more: tidelift.com