Since publication of this blog post, we are no longer offering the free trial of the Tidelift Subscription.
We’ve been wanting to make it easier for more people in more organizations to see the benefits of the Tidelift Subscription firsthand, and as of today, now they can with our new self-service free trial.
Get started with your trial in three easy steps.
The Tidelift Subscription helps organizations better manage the open source components that go into their applications and keep these critical components safe and up to date. Here are three things you can do during your free trial and why they matter:
The Tidelift Subscription gives your organization the tools to create, track, and manage catalogs of known-good open source packages your developers can safely use when building applications.
With catalogs in place, you can remove roadblocks that slow down developers and accelerate their pace of development. Instead of waiting until late in the build process, developers receive immediate feedback on whether or not a package is approved for use, and can easily request review for new packages. Once a package is reviewed and approved, it is added to your organization’s catalog, allowing other developers to use it right away without going through an approval process again. You can create multiple catalogs if you have different standards you want to apply for different deployment contexts (like a catalog for commercial products versus an internal service, for example).
With the free trial of the Tidelift Subscription, you’ll begin by uploading your package files (or using our test files if you’d prefer). From these package files, we will generate a software bill of materials (sBOM) to help you get a better understanding of the packages and versions you are using today.
You’ll be able to see the dependencies (including transitive dependencies) you use, and the licenses associated with these dependencies. All of these packages become part of your organization’s custom catalog and Tidelift will generate a set of tasks based on the standards and policies you decide on for your organization’s open source use. As you resolve these tasks over time, you will continue to improve the health of your organization’s open source catalog, giving developers even more known-good packages that they can use safely and worry free.
With the Tidelift Subscription, you set and track organization-wide policies for open source usage. For example, you can define licenses that are always acceptable or licenses that are never acceptable. You can set maintenance policies, e.g. whether or not packages in use should be actively maintained, and create exceptions for security vulnerabilities that are not relevant to how you use the package.
You can also use the subscription to create a review process around new open source packages that ensures that the right internal experts from legal, security, or other teams get a chance to review new packages before they are added to your organization’s custom catalogs.
In your free trial, you will have full access to all of the capabilities of the subscription for 14 days and can invite as many other people from your organization to try it out as you’d like. Start your free trial today!