<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=705633339897683&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">

The Tidelift maintainer advantage

Tidelift is the only company that partners with open source maintainers and pays them to:

Implement industry-leading secure software development practices and validate the practices they follow so organizations can have the same confidence in the security of their open source that they have in their own code.

Contractually commit to continue these practices into the future so that organizations can confidently make long term investments in the packages they use.

belt

More resilient, more secure open source dependencies

With Tidelift, security, engineering, and product leaders can gain confidence in the open source powering their applications:

  • Reduce cybersecurity attack vectors from packages not following secure software development practices.

  • Ensure open source package security is owned by maintainers paid to handle it end to end—including the security of the maintainers' own transitive dependencies.

  • Avoid costly rework caused by packages that are abandoned or left insecure.

  • Get more accurate and actionable early signals of risk so problematic packages can proactively be removed or avoided.

  • Make better upfront package selections based on a fuller understanding of their security and maintenance practices.

Learn how one large organization saved over $1.6M in manual package evaluation time and eliminated over 3,000 points of risk in applications running in production.

A new, proactive way to minimize open source risk

Tidelift works with our maintainer partners to give application development teams timely access to critical insights about the security practices of the open source packages they rely on. By using these insights to proactively improve the security and resilience of the open source powering their applications, organizations reduce risk to their revenue, data, and business continuity.

For organizations that have historically relied heavily on software scanning (also known as Software Composition Analysis or SCA) to improve open source security, Tidelift's approach of partnering with maintainers to proactively impact software security represents a powerful additional way to achieve even better security outcomes.

jackson-databind

jackson-databind

Maintainer Tatu Saloranta used income from Tidelift and its customers to completely rearchitect jackson-databind and eliminate the risk of RCE vulnerabilities.
minimist

minimist

Maintainer Jordan Harband saved minimist from deletion when its maintainer decided to delete their projects from GitHub.
urllib3

urllib3

Maintainer Seth Michael Larson was able to substantially improve urllib3 security practices thanks to income from Tidelift and its customers.
sockjs

SockJS

When SockJS maintainer Bryce Kahle took a new job that didn’t involve JavaScript, Asif Saif Uddin stepped in as maintainer, ensuring the project wasn’t abandoned.
jordan-harband-javascript-logo

Jordan Harband

Maintainer Jordan Harband used income from Tidelift and its customers to consistently maintain over 450 JavaScript packages during good times and bad.
Pillow: a Tidelift maintainer case story

Pillow

Maintainer Jeffrey A. Clark significantly improved security practices used to maintain Pillow, a popular Python Image Library package downloaded 3 million times a day.
mongoose-1

Mongoose

Maintainer Valeri Karpov of Mongoose implemented additional secure development practices and significantly improved the project’s OpenSSF scorecards score.
Apache Commons

Apache Commons

Maintainer Gary Gregory of Apache Commons used income from Tidelift and its customers to carve out &nbsp;time to create a more robust security review process.

Gain confidence knowing open source follows industry-leading security practices

Tidelift’s maintainer partners validate that their projects follow industry standard secure development best practices like those recommended in the NIST Secure Software Development Framework and the OpenSSF scorecards.

urllib3

Maintainer Seth Michael Larson was able to substantially improve urllib3 security practices thanks to income from Tidelift and its customers.

This gives organizations the confidence that their open source dependencies follow the secure development practices most enterprises expect. With maintainer-validated insights from Tidelift, organizations can quickly determine:

  • Is a package actively maintained or is it deprecated?

  • What security and maintenance practices does it follow?

  • Are the maintainers actively responding to security issues?

  • Are the maintainers producing new releases?

  • Are the maintainers supported by a foundation, a company, or other income sources?

  • Does it conform to my organization’s license policies?

Curious about how this helps your organization in the real world?

  • Learn more about how organizations use Tidelift data
  • Learn more about new government requirements impacting open source

Additional resources

10-questions
10 questions you should answer before using an open source project

When it comes to open source software security, many organizations rely heavily on software scanning (often called software composition analysis or SCA) as the primary means of defense. 

The 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report
The 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report

The results of the 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report are live! In this year's survey, we identified 12 big headlines out of the data we collected from 400 open source maintainers.

Tidelift_WebinarGraphics_social-Oct-07-2024-07-11-55-6309-PM
Open source security through the lens of Tidelift

Cisco’s internal development teams, using Corona enhanced with open source metadata provided by Tidelift, can now access insightful package metadata and gain additional insights into vulnerabilities.