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Comment by briandoll | Hacker News Reader

Tidelift is insanely exciting and I can't wait for this to be the primary way open source software is built, sustained, and matured.

Funding for open source is a crucial topic for everyone here. Nadia Eghbal's lemonade-stand [1] - A handy guide to financial support for open source - shows the myriad of solutions that have existed over the years, and none have really stood out.

Unlike foundations who spend significant portions of their funding on executives and other services for a narrow subset of the OSS ecosystem, Tidelift is doing something novel by doing something simple. Make it easy for companies to buy a subscription to open source software that carries added commercial benefits [2] and then take that money and pay the maintainers. That's it.

For companies and maintainers alike, this seems ideal.

[1] https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand [2] https://tidelift.com/subscription

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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.

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

Apologies, I didn't see that comment before. The target customer is large organizations and the pricing is typical for that. We'll be getting a pricing page up that explains the details. There are conditions and commitments for maintainers, see:

* https://tidelift.com/about/lifter * https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/tasks-overview * https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/agreement

This is a commercial transaction; subscribers are paying for value, and we are paying maintainers to help us provide the value. It is not a donation model. We think it is a favorable transaction for maintainers because it is royalty-style rather than hourly-consulting-style. The same amount of work can be sold N times.

For donations there are a number of existing solutions and we would encourage people to use them also!

> This is a commercial transaction; subscribers are paying for value, and we are paying maintainers to help us provide the value.

That's just not what your branding/advertising is telling me. I understand that's what's happening but the way you're billing it comes across like you're Patreon for open source.

50% !?!?!?!? What. The. Fuck.

This is absurd.

Non-engineering spend at open source companies like RedHat or Anaconda is typically much higher than 50% of revenues. That includes sales and marketing, getting through the IT approval process at big companies, etc. all of which is difficult and pretty expensive.

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