The Tidelift Subscription is a comprehensive solution to managing open source across the organization. It includes the tools to create, track, and manage customizable catalogs of known-good, proactively maintained open source components backed by Tidelift and its open source maintainer partners. The Tidelift Subscription allows organizations to efficiently manage the ways its developers use thousands of open source projects across JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, .NET, Rust, and more.
With the Tidelift Subscription in place, organizations can accelerate development, cut costs, and reduce risk when building applications with open source, so they can create even more incredible software, even faster.
In a world where software supply chain attacks are an increasingly prominent existential threat (think Equifax or SolarWinds) and make front-page news, organizations are rethinking how they manage the software they use.
Meanwhile, open source has become the modern development platform. A recent Tidelift study shows that 92% of enterprise software projects contain open source dependencies and in those projects as much as 70% or more of the code is open source.
There are countless open source components in use across global organizations. Not all of these components are created equal, for a number of reasons:
In fact, our data shows that only 16% of large organizations are extremely confident that the open source components they use are up to date, secure, and well maintained, while almost 40% are not very or not at all confident.
Many organizations are seeking ways to improve their open source management practices so they can optimize the health of their open source supply chain.
Most organizations fall along a continuum from those who have no processes or policies in place to those with strict policies and scanning-based solutions in place.
With this approach, developers on each team bring in new components on their own. If scanning tools are being used, the results are often ignored.
Upside
No roadblocks, devs can build and deploy quickly.
downside
Creates possibility for maintenance and security nightmares
With this approach, the organization tightly controls open source usage to avoid risk. Scanning tools block deployments until developers address concerns, which they can’t always do.
Upside
Reduce risk, avoid becoming next Equifax
downside
Hard to move quickly and developers are frustrated
Include the tools that help your organization manage those sets of components proactively as internal policies/standards and open source software evolves
Integrate with your build chain and minimize the disruption of your existing processes
Incentivize the open source software development community to continue to maintain and improve the packages your business depends on
Provide a set of “good” dependencies for each of the major frameworks or “stacks” your developers want to work with
This is why we created the Tidelift Subscription: to give your organization a comprehensive way to efficiently manage the open source you use for application development.
The Tidelift Subscription includes all of the tools you need to efficiently track and manage open source across the organization.
We research and advise you on how to resolve security, maintenance, and licensing issues. Get a head start on building a paved path for your organization’s developers with our Tidelift-managed catalogs of known-good, proactively-maintained open source components covering the language frameworks you use every day.
Tidelift partners directly with the independent maintainers behind thousands of open source projects—with more added every day. We pay the maintainers to keep their projects enterprise-ready, meeting clearly defined security, licensing, and maintenance standards.
The more subscribers using a project, the more its maintainers get paid. Which means they can dedicate even more time to maintenance and security tasks, while continuing to invest in making their projects even better.
"Tidelift is positioned as the single source of content for supported technologies so enterprises can build and manage their software using known-good OSS components."
Al Gillen and Elaina Stergiades, IDC
Increase development velocity
Build with safe, approved, and compliant packages from the start to speed up development and reduce technical debt.
Establish a paved path for developers
Get a single place to define, review, and enforce policies around security vulnerabilities in open source components.
Move fast and avoid rework
Eliminate late-breaking surprises that slow down development by using pre-approved, known-good open source components.
Reduce open source-related risk
Get a single place to define, review, and enforce license policies and get indemnification to protect against licensing-related risk.