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I really like the sound of this, however when there is a lack of transparency on the site regarding costs, and breakdown of how the money is divided (payment ha

I really like the sound of this, however when there is a lack of transparency on the site regarding costs, and breakdown of how the money is divided (payment handling, a cut for the company themselves etc.) - and you need to "request a demo" to find out enough to make a decision, no matter how genuine this proposition is, I feel it loses a lot of it's open source positive credentials. As a side example, Elementary OS App Store is an example of more what I'd expect, they try to encourage payment for open source projects and handle the distribution of funds, but they have transparent costs and the project itself is open source. Please can you include more information on your website. Also in terms of vulnerability mitigation, NPM have started giving me warnings, so I am much better able to handle the upgrade / management / damage limitation of using packages with known vulnerabilities for JS at least. I'm sure that's coming more widely, so for me the Licence stuff is great, and some of the vulnerability info is handy, but if I was to use the service it would be to primarily pay out for packages I use professionally, so with the current info provide, that's an instant no. I'd have considered it genuinely if I knew what it was exactly you were proposing.

caf 8y ago
Agreed. We're not stupid, we know there has to be a rake - so just tell us what it is.
hp 8y ago
Tidelift co-founder here, thanks everyone for the interest. I've added a discussion of Tidelift's share to the docs at https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/paying https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/paying TLDR our commitment is to pay out at least 50%. What we're doing at Tidelift is an enterprise software product (analogous to something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux), but a difference is that instead of hiring a bunch of people to repackage upstream projects, we're offering upstream maintainers the _option_ to participate directly by helping us do the work - for a revenue share, rather than a flat fee. The app store analogy isn't quite right; an app store provides a catalog and some review services, but much of their 30% rake is profit as far as I know. The Tidelift share includes funding all the non-engineering parts of an enterprise software business, including a crucial one, a sales team. The point of this is to make the pie larger. We want to pay the maintainers (at least) 50% of a lot of money, instead of 90% of a little money. btw there are a number of options out there to make straight donations to projects and we support those! That isn't mutually exclusive with what we're doing here and in fact many of our participating maintainers also take donations.
- sammorrowdrums 8y ago
  Thanks for a bit of added clarity. I do understand it is more than an app store model, good luck with making open source projects more sustainable. I actually do wonder if some of your revenue should go on bug bounties too, rather than project income only (even though I know some of that will probably be put towards bug bounties), but regardless I hope it changes the ecosystem for the better. The main part of the Elementary OS app store analogy was that it is all free software, and their intention was to encourage people to pay for it regardless, which is the only crossover with you - I think the guys there would actually be interested in this model too.

caf 8y ago

Agreed. We're not stupid, we know there has to be a rake - so just tell us what it is.

hp 8y ago

Tidelift co-founder here, thanks everyone for the interest. I've added a discussion of Tidelift's share to the docs at https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/paying https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/paying TLDR our commitment is to pay out at least 50%. What we're doing at Tidelift is an enterprise software product (analogous to something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux), but a difference is that instead of hiring a bunch of people to repackage upstream projects, we're offering upstream maintainers the _option_ to participate directly by helping us do the work - for a revenue share, rather than a flat fee. The app store analogy isn't quite right; an app store provides a catalog and some review services, but much of their 30% rake is profit as far as I know. The Tidelift share includes funding all the non-engineering parts of an enterprise software business, including a crucial one, a sales team. The point of this is to make the pie larger. We want to pay the maintainers (at least) 50% of a lot of money, instead of 90% of a little money. btw there are a number of options out there to make straight donations to projects and we support those! That isn't mutually exclusive with what we're doing here and in fact many of our participating maintainers also take donations.

sammorrowdrums 8y ago
Thanks for a bit of added clarity. I do understand it is more than an app store model, good luck with making open source projects more sustainable. I actually do wonder if some of your revenue should go on bug bounties too, rather than project income only (even though I know some of that will probably be put towards bug bounties), but regardless I hope it changes the ecosystem for the better. The main part of the Elementary OS app store analogy was that it is all free software, and their intention was to encourage people to pay for it regardless, which is the only crossover with you - I think the guys there would actually be interested in this model too.