Increasingly, security vulnerabilities like Log4Shell are drawing more attention to open source software maintenance, and governments and industries around the world are making open source security a top priority. This increased attention has led to maintainers being asked to do more and more work.
Yet most maintainers are volunteers. A recent Tidelift maintainer survey showed that 60% of maintainers are unpaid hobbyists. And countering the regularly cited theory that most maintainers prefer to work on open source as an unpaid hobby, our survey found that 77% of the maintainers who are not paid would prefer to get paid.
The crisis of overworked open source maintainers being asked to do more isn’t just wrong, it is dangerous.
At Tidelift, we want to change this. We see a world where open source maintainers get full recognition and compensation for the value they create. We see a world where maintainers thrive.
Tidelift analyzes and aggregates the most meaningful industry standards, and pays open source maintainers to ensure their projects meet those standards. Examples of standards include annotating licenses, documenting security policies, properly tracking and communicating package dependencies, and implementing two-factor authentication. You can hear more about this directly from a Tidelift partnered maintainer, Seth Larson of urllib3, in this webinar.
We provide access to a streamlined dashboard that helps maintainers efficiently manage common package maintenance tasks, and we provide help and guidance to keep the work as quick and painless as possible.
Tidelift pays maintainers income based on a number of factors, including subscriber usage and strategic importance of a package to the overall health and resilience of the open source software supply chain.
We analyze each of our customers' uploaded software bills of materials (SBOMs) and distribute income to maintainers based on the projects subscribers use. In addition, we also make strategic assessments regarding projects that are critical to ensuring the health of the overall open source software supply chain, and provide base income to many of these projects as well. Read more about how we pay lifters.
See if your package is eligible for income right now by typing it into this search bar.
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Here are a few examples of how Tidelift working directly with the maintainers has helped bring benefits to the software supply chain that spread well beyond just the individual packages they maintain.
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