The 2024 Tidelift maintainer impact report

Our annual maintainer impact report shines a light on the most current and compelling evidence of the positive outcomes organizations can achieve when they invest directly in their open source software supply chain by paying maintainers.

In the 2024 report, we directly connect secure upstream open source software to reduced organizational risk and improved operational efficiency by sharing a case story of how one organization improved the security and resilience of an important Python application and was able to realize these bottom line results:

• Saved $1.1 million of organizational time across engineering, legal, and security that would have been spent on requirements research and engineering implementation time

• Reduced application risk by turning 37% of this customer’s independently maintained packages from an “unknown future” to reliably secured and maintained, with a plan in place to grow that percentage to 58% in 2025 and 80% in 2026

The report also gathers this year's most compelling data showing maintainer impact on improving security and operational efficiency outcomes from our own research and other important sources like Sonatype and the Atlantic Council.