Tidelift wants open-source developers to get paid

They're proposing to guarantee 50% of the money in to be paid back out.

They've not answered other questions I asked a while back...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17957901

I also hope that in the future more open source development will be funded in a sustainable way, but as it stands right now I very much hope that it's not via Tidelift. Of all the approaches I've seen so far, Tidelift is among the most intransparent ones, and with that a very bad fit for open source in my opinion.

I couldn't find any numbers (incl. your "90%"), more clarity would be appreciated, though I understand Tidelift is still an experiment. But this explanation [0] caught my eye:

> How we compute how much to pay

> A weight. …based primarily on code size with some adjustments…

So, payments based off a clear (and clearly silly) metric that's easy to game. What could possibly go wrong?

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

It's like thinking of Free Market as something beneficial to you as a pleb with a meager capital.

> But I had no idea that it also meant that code automatically became gratis for everyone.

I think it's common sense. If I sell you a software and provide you the source code with a GPL license, you are free to publish the code online for everyone to download free. So yes, open source invariably implies no cost to end user.

Because you cannot prevent redistribution of the source code, so there is no way to enforce payments to the original authors.

This is the major reason why consumer desktop software for FOSS platforms is a commercial failure, unless tied to server walls.

You can try to sell open source software. The problem is you can easily be undercut, because anyone else can sell it too, or even give it away. As the original developer, you're actually somewhat at a disadvantage, as you have to pay for the expenses of development, while your competitors do not.

It's pretty rare for anyone to make money directly from selling their open source software. Most open source business models involve selling something else, like support or hardware.

you can absolutely sell your code and still license it under GPL. Just, if someone buys it, and it is really GPL licensed, then they must be allowed to redistribute it without further restrictions. So any third person can then get it for free. So the only reason to buy it from you would be "because it's the sane/right thing to do" which makes it look very much like a donation...

IIRC there was a project that tried a "we give it to you as GPL, but if you redistribute it, we'll not sell you future versions" kind of deal. I want to say some kernel patch set? At the time there was quite a bit of debate about whether that's okay

There are a few games that I know of with free software licenses (one with the GPL) that sell their software no problem. As others have mentioned, free software (and open source software as well) do not disallow redistribution. So if you have obtained a license for the software (by buying it for instance), nothing is stopping you from giving it away for free (or selling it yourself). In a large market, this will cause the price to tend towards zero.

In practice, though, at least for the games I know about, even though they are free software, people prefer to buy them for various reasons. A few of the games are on Steam, and some people just like to buy games on Steam. They don't mind forking over a small fee for the convenience of having everything in one packaging system. Some games have official servers that you can't use without paying money, so most players prefer to pay the money and use the official servers (instead of having to maintain their own).

For other kinds of free software, I think most people do not have a business model in mind when they write the software. If it's part of a company initiative, having other developers trained in your code base before they join the company is well worth the effort of freeing up the software. Zero price reduces the barrier to entry.

There are a few companies that have tried to make a pure Free software play. Werner Koch has funded himself and occasionally a small team for GPG development with various contracts. I think he's well funded now from donations. Probably the most famous and successful pure Free software play was Cygnus software which did the development for GCC an the Autoconf tools for a decade or so. They grew their business from $3K to selling out to Red Hat for $600 million. They just had a good business plan and a product in the perfect space (making GCC run on embedded systems for large corporations). Another example is Code Weavers which is technically open core, but I think pretty much everything they do ends up in Wine eventually. Again, customer development for large organisations in order to allow Windows apps to run on Posix systems.

Quite a few free software systems work in a kind of consortium model. That would include organisations like Apache -- a group of big companies get together and agree to fund the development of certain projects because it makes sense for them to share development costs. Another very good example of that is Blender and I think their business model has been extremely effective -- get funding for small projects that make them relevant to the movie industry and then reap the benefits from the consortium model.

There are quite a few more, but you get the idea. The main thing about Free and Open Source software is that it's hard to have a pure play if your product is software. If you are selling services, or doing custom development, or are aiming to make yourself indispensable to a certain industry so that they fund you... you can do it. If you want to charge for your software (like the games I mentioned above), then you pretty much have to hope that there is a reason why your customers will choose to pay you rather than trying to find the software somewhere else. That might be difficult (but like I said, I've been surprised that some people are actually able to make a living at it).

Yeah cause our companies love to let third parties “analyze” our code.

The sheer amount of open source code that pretty much any software out there runs on is absolutely astonishing. Especially when you start taking into account transitive dependencies. Say I'm running Java... Someone had to compile the JVM and it was probably done on an open source compiler.

Crazy to think of how many thousands of man hours have gone into something as simple as allowing me to argue with someone over the internet.

You mean providing leftpad to the world isn't worth a buck a month from thousands of different people? I mean, that might have taken someone a while five minutes to write. If they weren't that familiar with JavaScript and had to look up some stuff in the docs that is...

Will eg. left-pad receive the same amount as Express?

Hi, Tidelift cofounder here. This is a reason we don't charge per-package. It costs the same whatever customers report. (Which is what the Wired "Netflix" analogy is about.)

The incentive to report accurately is that subscription benefits only apply to packages we know someone's using. Some of those benefits are dependency analysis results, others are services or assurances. For example, we'd only know to tell them about security vulnerabilities in a package they actually say they use.

I don't think that's at all impossible for Dell or the other OEMs to do (and I think some of that might already be happening a bit) but overall I don't think they particularly mind using Windows for their computers. There's a whole class of customer support issues that another company has to deal with for them, they avoid the "why can't I install this program that my daughter sent me?" type problems and overall they just give their "learned about computers in the 90's"-business segment exactly what they expect.

They do pay for drivers and other engineering work. I don’t know how it is now but Canonical was in that business.

As for why OEMs don’t do it more, or why they don’t do it instead of paying for Windows licences: custom dev, testing and certification for each model variant is a significant cost. Even if the OEM saves that money of Windows licences, the market mostly demands Windows.

System76 is a company that produces laptops and desktops with their own custom Ubuntu variant, if you want to see an example of one company going the full Linux route.

They do already and have been for a couple decades. Dell in particular has had a long history of doing so. Personally, I have worked for a couple companies that have done just that. Now when you look at certain classes of machines for specific workloads you will see engineering specifically for Linux. But when most people look at MSFT & Apple they are thinking about the desktop. And if you look in certain corporate environments, you will find Linux thin clients, but those tend to be very specific highly regulated environments.

The one thing I dislike about Patreon (which I notified them about as well) is that I need a subscription for everything. Say I have a few dollar of disposable income I just want to donate to opensource indiscriminately I need to make a choice of which. And there are only so many levels (each with a baseline) in Patreon that a lot of smaller projects get left out.

I would like to have just one amount per month that gets withdrawn that I don't have to think about any further. And that just gets distributed over projects. With the idea that a lot of micro payments make more than a few big payments.

A crucial difference from Patreon is that this is a commercial service (an enterprise maintenance subscription). Participating maintainers help do the work behind it, and subscribers who buy it receive benefits for their money.

This is complementary to and different from a donation model.

NumPy and other things in the Python ecosystem are certainly part of what they're considering.

The founder/CEO of Tidelift is actually participating in a keynote panel this morning at the NumFOCUS summit.

I get it, it's fun to be cynical about things, but these are folks that are legitimately trying to help.

Our ideal is that if a subscriber is using it, we can sign up its maintainer. The Tidelift platform is built on an OSS project called libraries.io which supports many package managers: https://libraries.io/platforms Here's what's involved in adding more: https://github.com/librariesio/libraries.io/blob/master/docs...

This is very true, and somehow I'm not that surprised to find this comment near the bottom of the discussion... seems that many people don't realize it, including HN readers!

That appears to rarely work out for anyone, so I'd recommend trying to find some free server hosting because your project is open source.

Maybe also look into https://licensezero.com. Even if you don't like the licenses (I think they are good), there are lots of interested articles in the blog.

People already do to make sure they are complying with licenses and not using licenses they dont approve.

Yep, F500 companies bring in all sorts of external tools to look at their source code, for compliance, security, etc.

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 ).

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.

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.

For large companies to buy something, there's considerable overhead: legal review, finance review, management, budget, etc.

That's _after_ someone at the company has figured out what the product is and that it makes sense to buy.

We wouldn't want all of this overhead involved every time a developer adds a new package to an app. And if it were involved for all the thousands of deps most teams have these days, there would be a whole second team just managing the purchases.

As a practical matter, software teams need to buy dozens rather than thousands of products.

By grouping a lot of packages together, Tidelift lets those thousand transitive dependencies benefit, while previously only the largest high-profile projects had a chance.

This reality (that buying stuff has a lot of friction) also explains why Tidelift builds "fund a sales team" into the model.

Here's an interesting article from patio11 on enterprise sales and purchasing: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris...

Some people dont want to deal with that aspect of the business. Anyone that does is free to

This "charge for commercial use" model was tried -- shareware -- and was an economic failure. It's advocated against by most organizations, like FSF and Creative Commons.

At most you see a "this is GPL but I wrote it so I'll give you a license to not follow the GPL for my code". Which is a quite different thing.

>usage for other OSS is free and commercial users need to buy a license

Because that makes your code not open source

It won't be open source and a lot of people will just avoid using shareware dependencies and especially contributing to them.

Because selling stuff requires more effort than just "here's my price, pay me".

By doing that, you've put your code into the realm of "commercial software", which engages with companies/corporate use in a whole different modality. If you've never sold software to a business, you will have no idea how much is involved in this side of things.

In addition to being treated differently by your potential customers, you will also earn the hatred and ire of your open-source-loving colleagues. Some bored college kid will see your dual-licensed software as an immoral act, and spend time building a less-awesome and more incomplete "completely free" version, which will then attract dev mindshare and users and eventually ossify into a de facto standard which you will then have to support.

That college kid will one day graduate, and think he can build a business on top of this amazing software he's made that everyone loves and wants to use, and then sit around trying to figure out how to make money from it. He may even consider making a "free-mium" model or an "enterprise" offering on top of the "open core" of his widely adopted OSS.

These will most likely fail, because - again - SELLING THINGS IS HARD.

Then you and this college kid who disrupted your dual-licensed OSS will one day meet at a symposium for "open source sustainability". It will be awkward. Teeth will be gnashed. You will get lectured about not having just used Patreon. Meanwhile the companies that use your and the college kid's OSS continue to hit their quarterly numbers for Wall Street. Executives earn out bonuses. The circle of life continues.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The open source part of our implementation is here: https://github.com/librariesio/libraries.io https://github.com/librariesio/bibliothecary

False.

They're trying to create a new marketplace where commercial users of OSS can actually give money back to FOSS devs.

Many FOSS devs live a life of poverty because they have no idea how to actually sell things of value around their free artifacts and free labor. It turns out that selling stuff is hard, in general, and feels almost nothing like coding. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Tidelift tracks down all the individual developers and gives those "subscribing" a single point to pay. That's their primary added value.

It sounds like the developers make some sort of “promise” to maintain the software. Not really sure how that’s enforced or what even constitutes regular maintenance. I doubt anyone is committing to an SLA for fixes for the relatively paltry sums mentioned in the article (at least $10K over two years).

It’s an interesting idea but it sounds like it lacks anything that really binds the developer to a level of service. Plus the pay isn’t “quit your day job”-good so ya know, that day job is gonna take priority. My gut reaction is that it sounds like an easy way for companies to pay a sum that lets them feel less guilty about freeloading off someone else’s work, and if the developer is more responsive to their requests, hey, bonus.

I think you're conflating two meanings of the word 'bazaar' in this context.

Who defines what non-sense is? The dev? Tidelift? You?

Perhaps "ASCAP for Open Source" might be a closer analogy?

https://www.ascap.com/music-users/licensefinder

I agree with you, it took me a while to understand this was not about videos at all. Nor about Netflix-like opensource efforts.

It's the result of people writing "articles" in a hurry, and going with the nearest and stupidest cliché that occurs to them.

It's inevitably going to distract the discussion, so we've taken Netflix out of the title above.

Not the first time, or the latest, either: https://hn.algolia.com/?query="netflix%20for"