Open Source & More - Blog | Tidelift

Tidelift and the Python Software Foundation join up to support Flask and Pallets Projects

Written by Donald Fischer | September 17, 2019

Today the Python Software Foundation and Tidelift announced a partnership to support the community-driven Pallets Projects. These include the open source Flask web development microframework and Jinja2, Werkzeug, itsdangerous, MarkupSafe, click, and Flask-SQLAlchemy libraries. Together they’re among the most widely used projects in the Python ecosystem.

The Pallets Projects’ easy on-ramp and extensibility make them ideal for creating basic and sophisticated web applications alike. Engineering teams at Pinterest, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Petco, Indeed, Twilio, Boston Consulting Group, and thousands of other organizations across industries use Flask to build data-driven applications.

Armin Ronacher created Flask in 2010. Since then, the team behind the framework and libraries expanded to include David Lord and Adrian Mönnich. Tidelift provides income to support their work on Pallets, and the maintainers deliver commercial assurances around maintenance, security, and licensing through the Tidelift Subscription

With the subscription and a managed open source strategy in place, application development teams get back time in their day they’d otherwise spend managing their snarl of open source components and dependencies. Our surveys consistently show this is about one-quarter of the time they spend on code maintenance. Development teams also reduce their organization’s exposure to security and licensing risk associated with continuously evolving open source projects, while improving the health of their open source dependencies. 

Tidelift supports hundreds of Python packages beyond Pallets that are used in production millions of times a day. A few notable examples include the Coverage.py library for measuring code coverage in Python programs, the Celery distributed task queue, the marshmallow library for converting complex datatypes to and from Python datatypes, and the urllib3 HTTP client. By partnering directly with open source maintainers of these and more than 1,000 additional packages, Tidelift has become the largest single source of commercial support for community-led open source projects. 

We also continue to grow our work with key community organizations in the JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, Java, and .NET ecosystems. Today’s partnership with the Python Software Foundation follows our recently announced collaboration with Ruby Together to support essential Ruby infrastructure.

Tidelift is delighted to partner with the Python Software Foundation to support the Pallets team. We look forward to continuing to build Tidelift Subscription coverage of the incredibly dynamic Python ecosystem and collaborating with the open source maintainers who drive its continued innovation.