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I'm honestly confused, would love someone to explain: From Wired: "Tidelift doesn't offer technical support" From Tidelift site: "The professional support you

I'm honestly confused, would love someone to explain: From Wired: "Tidelift doesn't offer technical support" From Tidelift site: "The professional support you need." So, which is it? From Wired: "[Tidelift] doesn't employ the developers who maintain open source projects." From Wired: "[D]evelopers can focus on code instead of sales and marketing." If they aren't employees, what are they? Contractors? I can see how it simplifies things to have to deal with 1 party instead of N, but if they aren't paying you a full salary it seems like a developer would still need to deal with sales and marketing.

hp 8y ago
The issue here is that "support" is an overloaded word. Tidelift does not ask maintainers to be a help desk where subscribers can call them up directly. But we do provide certain assurances and help with open source dependencies, through a combination of our own efforts and that of participating maintainers. Maintainers who sign up are contractors (here is the contract: https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/agreement https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/agreement ). It's not that developers don't have to think about sales and marketing _at all_, but it's much reduced vs. starting one's own company from scratch. All those jobs that sales, marketing, finance, operations, etc. are normally doing at a company are things that Tidelift takes on.
dx87 8y ago
From what I've gathered, the developers don't work for Tidelift in any capacity, Tidelift just collects money on their behalf whether they want it or not. If you agree to Tidelift's terms, you get a portion of the money they collected. I still don't see how they're helping open-source developers though. They keep saying that it'll be easier for big corporations to have a single place to pay, but they're going to take a huge chunk of the money for themselves instead of giving it to the developers, and the amount the developers get is based on some secret formula. I really don't see how this benefits anyone except themselves and big corporations wanting to say that they're helping OSS, but not really caring where the money goes.
- hp 8y ago
  I would say that we collect money on behalf of the companies who buy an enterprise maintenance subscription from us, and we agree to provide those maintenance services. So far this is what many OSS businesses do. But while existing OSS businesses hire 100% their own staff to then provide the service, we split our revenue with interested maintainers who want to help provide the service. We are creating an opportunity for upstream projects to participate directly _if they want to_. If they don't want to, then no problem! The beneficiaries are: subscribing companies get an enterprise maintenance service for their dependencies; participating maintainers get paid a revenue share (royalty-style model) for doing work on their project. Tidelift's share of revenue mostly is not profit. It's analogous to what any software vendor would pay for the nontechnical roles at the company. https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/paying https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/paying goes into more detail on that. It is worth spending money on sales, because even though it lowers the _percentage_ of revenue going to engineering, it increases the _amount_ of revenue going to engineering. Businesses spend money on sales/marketing/finance/ops because it results in more money overall. The same math applies to Tidelift. All other open source vendors give maintainers a 0% cut, though the best ones do add a lot of "in kind" value in the form of contributions, those contributions often actually create more work for the primary maintainers, and everyone ends up bottlenecking on those overworked maintainers. Tidelift is not a money transfer or donation system. It's a commercial service provided in cooperation with interested upstream projects.

hp 8y ago

The issue here is that "support" is an overloaded word. Tidelift does not ask maintainers to be a help desk where subscribers can call them up directly. But we do provide certain assurances and help with open source dependencies, through a combination of our own efforts and that of participating maintainers. Maintainers who sign up are contractors (here is the contract: https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/agreement https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/agreement ). It's not that developers don't have to think about sales and marketing _at all_, but it's much reduced vs. starting one's own company from scratch. All those jobs that sales, marketing, finance, operations, etc. are normally doing at a company are things that Tidelift takes on.

dx87 8y ago

From what I've gathered, the developers don't work for Tidelift in any capacity, Tidelift just collects money on their behalf whether they want it or not. If you agree to Tidelift's terms, you get a portion of the money they collected. I still don't see how they're helping open-source developers though. They keep saying that it'll be easier for big corporations to have a single place to pay, but they're going to take a huge chunk of the money for themselves instead of giving it to the developers, and the amount the developers get is based on some secret formula. I really don't see how this benefits anyone except themselves and big corporations wanting to say that they're helping OSS, but not really caring where the money goes.

hp 8y ago
I would say that we collect money on behalf of the companies who buy an enterprise maintenance subscription from us, and we agree to provide those maintenance services. So far this is what many OSS businesses do. But while existing OSS businesses hire 100% their own staff to then provide the service, we split our revenue with interested maintainers who want to help provide the service. We are creating an opportunity for upstream projects to participate directly _if they want to_. If they don't want to, then no problem! The beneficiaries are: subscribing companies get an enterprise maintenance service for their dependencies; participating maintainers get paid a revenue share (royalty-style model) for doing work on their project. Tidelift's share of revenue mostly is not profit. It's analogous to what any software vendor would pay for the nontechnical roles at the company. https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/paying https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/paying goes into more detail on that. It is worth spending money on sales, because even though it lowers the _percentage_ of revenue going to engineering, it increases the _amount_ of revenue going to engineering. Businesses spend money on sales/marketing/finance/ops because it results in more money overall. The same math applies to Tidelift. All other open source vendors give maintainers a 0% cut, though the best ones do add a lot of "in kind" value in the form of contributions, those contributions often actually create more work for the primary maintainers, and everyone ends up bottlenecking on those overworked maintainers. Tidelift is not a money transfer or donation system. It's a commercial service provided in cooperation with interested upstream projects.