Does Tidelift count?

[chadwhitacre]

Anyone have experience with Tidelift? Does a Tidelift subscription count towards fulfillment of the Pledge? 🤔

[chadwhitacre]

I watched the video at https://tidelift.com/subscription. I think we should count Tidelift subscriptions towards a company's Open Source Pledge membership dues. The story is highly aligned (e.g.). It'll help us with network effect if Tidelift is on board. Maybe if someone wants to make the case for it we could discount Tidelift subscription since it comes with some strings attached for maintainers and also a significant portion goes to funding Tidelift. Otoh foundations have similar basic challenges and we decided on #45 not to sweat it too much as long as a company isn't only paying through a large foundation like LF that doesn't actually pay maintainers transparently. tl;dr I think we effectively treat Tidelift like another foundation.

[chadwhitacre]

Relevant.

[voxpelli]

@chadwhitacre Can we reopen and frame it as Tidelift-style services rather than Tidelift only? Its the principles that matter the most

[chadwhitacre]

What's another example of a Tidelift-style service? I'd rather workshop specific examples than talk only in the abstract.

[voxpelli]

One aspect of the service is similar to thanks.dev and StackAid, another is similar to HeroDevs (the SLA / security part) and a third is unique in that they sign contracts with maintainers

[tieguy]

Thanks, Chad. Obviously the fit is somewhat awkward (I'd love us to be perfectly transparent too!) but we're definitely in the spirit of the thing. LMK if you have any questions about it.

[rhertzog]

IMO it would be nice to be able to somehow "attest" organizations that are willing to act as intermediary between companies and maintainers. Or even more precisely attest specific services of those organizations. The opensourcepledge project can help to impose transparency and give criteria for what's acceptable and what's not.

I don't know the specifics of tidelift, but I certainly agree that in principle it ought to be allowed. Myself, as a long time Debian developer, I have been working to figure out ways to fund the work of Debian developers and one of the results is the Debian LTS sponsorship: https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/

I'm not sure that it would qualify for the open source pledge, because the expectation of sponsors is to fund work on security updates. But that said the good hourly rate for that work does allow Debian developers to spend time on other Debian tasks.

Also now that we have a relationship with many Debian-using companies, we are thinking of morphing that offer into something with fewer strings attached. So maybe in the future, companies buying Debian LTS contracts could be allowed to count 50% of the contract as valid for the open source pledge because we would have the freedom to spend that 50% to support any Debian developer/maintainer.

Or maybe we would create a new service tailored to meet the criteria of the opensourcepledge... and our added value would be to simplify the work of funding a community of 1000 Debian developers. Foundations are great, but at least in the context of Debian, using project-money to pay developers has been a difficult topic.

Ideally each community manages to answer those hard political questions of who/what to fund, but in the mean time, the solution of letting the pledging company chose who is going to act as gatekeeper for their monetary donation is an effective solution.