Hello, Tidelift

10 PRINT "HELLO, WORLD”

Hello from Tidelift!

Our mission is to make open source software work better for developers and users.

We're a team of open source true believers, with a pragmatic bent.

We’re getting started, and we’d like to share some of our perspective and early activities.

Open Source is 💯

Open source is truly everywhere.  It powers financial markets, scientific discoveries, and that buzzing thing in your pocket.

Open source can level the playing field in fascinating ways.  At its best, it’s a way for developers to run with their ideas, regardless of geography or background.  

And billions of lines of open source code provide an amazing starting point for innovators of all kinds.

What we’ve collectively achieved with open source is incredible.

It’s got issues, though

Alas, open source isn’t perfect.

Users of open source sometimes struggle with issues of maintainability, quality, security, and support of the open source projects they depend on.

Creators of open source have lots of good motivations, but their projects are often a side pursuit for them.

The result? The “reward” for creators of successful open source projects is often a tidal wave of complaints from their users, which they don’t have the time or resources to address.

Oops.

Wouldn’t we all prefer a world where both users and creators of open source win, every time?

Where to start?

To navigate a path forward, it helps to have a map of the terrain.

We’re excited to have Andrew Nesbitt and Ben Nickolls, the creators of Libraries.io, join our team to help us build that map.

Libraries.io is the largest database of open source projects on the web. It actively monitors over 2.5 million open source libraries across 34 different package managers. It tracks package releases, attributes, and more than 141 million individual software dependencies. Whoa!

Libraries.io helps you discover new software, monitor your dependencies, and even maintain your own open source project.

Best of all, the software behind Libraries.io is already an open source project and it’s operated as a free service with open data.  

We're excited to push forward with Libraries.io and its commercial cousin, Dependency CI, now as part of Tidelift.

What next?

We’re in this for the long haul, and we’ve got some more projects coming up that we’ll be talking about soon.

If you’re a like-minded user or maintainer of open source software, we’d like to have you join us for the ride.

What to do next?

• If you’re not already familiar with it, take a moment to explore Libraries.io
• Read more from Andrew and Ben 
• Follow us on Twitter at @tidelift and @librariesio
• Sign up for updates from our team
• Consider joining our team in Boston or remote
• Get in touch with us at info@tidelift.com