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Comment by sleepychu | Hacker News Reader

> In return, subscribers can be confident that those packages are well-maintained.

1. How can they be confident of that? (Hint: it seems like what you're saying is that you'll place some conditions on maintainers, presumably if you see enough adoption this could make you a powerful stakeholder)

2. I see tidelift offers some value in managing your other dependency concerns, I assume they extract some money for this. What is the ratio of money paid to maintainers v.s. extracted by tidelift.

3. How much are you charging for this service? Couldn't see a pricing page.

4. Who is the intended audience? Large orgs? SME? Single developers?

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Good questions - also how does Tidelift avoid people gaming the system?

E.g. my node_modules folder is full of thousands and thousands of packages, could I, as the maintainer of several of those packages, split them into 100 sub packages, all dependent on each other and claim 100x the money?

> how does Tidelift avoid people gaming the system?

From the website [0]:

"For each package, we compute a share of subscription fees. There are three main factors in this computation:

- Subscriber usage. Packages receive a share of fees only from those subscribers using the package. More subscribers using the package means more money!

- How much subscribers pay. If we charge subscribers more, there's more to divide up.

- A weight. A package containing a large framework gets a larger share than one containing a 2-line function. Currently, the weight is based primarily on code size. Please do not try to game the system by putting extra junk in your package—we will penalize this, and more importantly your users and other maintainers will suffer. If we tweak our weightings in the future, we'll strive to do so in a way that avoids radically changing existing income levels. "

It seems they're aware of the possibility of gaming.

[0] https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/paying

Edit: formatting

The weight is a very difficult problem in my opinion.

Indeed. Amongst other issues this scheme appears to encourage making a large volume of moderately-useful changes to a lot of repositories, rather than a smaller number of difficult but essential changes.

The Facebook effect coming to OSS. Lots of activity and noise, little to negavitve value.

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