Today Tidelift and Ruby Together jointly announced an industry-first collaboration to support critical Ruby infrastructure. Through the Tidelift Subscription, we’re now connecting enterprise application development teams relying on Ruby to the more than 100 developers already working with Ruby Together to power the infrastructure behind every Ruby project.
We started Tidelift to help pay open source maintainers for their work on the thousands of packages that are vital to the daily work of corporate application development teams. The Tidelift Subscription provides a way to pay maintainers for their contributions, while delivering a valuable service enterprise users have long needed in return. Our managed open source approach gets enterprise development teams out of the business of wrangling their own open source dependencies, instead introducing a new way to collaborate with community project maintainers—saving time and reducing risk.
Maintainers remain independent and in full control of their projects while earning a dependable stream of income for standing behind them. Enterprise application developers receive more reliable open source components and better-managed application dependencies. Everyone wins.
The joint effort with Ruby Together, a non-profit foundation, represents an important expansion of Tidelift’s work because it supports resources that benefit the entire Ruby ecosystem. Through the Tidelift Subscription, we’re now providing income to Ruby Together to help continuously improve Bundler, the gem installer used by every Ruby developer; RubyGems, the library behind all Ruby software packages; and RubyGems.org, the website providing billions of gem downloads.
Enterprise teams value tangible benefits covered by service level agreements. Our collaboration with Ruby Together means Tidelift subscribers will now receive these important maintenance, security, and licensing assurances for key Ruby packages.
Through Tidelift, Ruby Together gains new access to enterprise open source teams that work across ecosystems. Heavy Ruby users like Stripe, Handshake, Bleacher Report, DigitalOcean, and Triplebyte are already Ruby Together members, funding support of Ruby infrastructure. With this new initiative, Tidelift will help broaden Ruby Together’s reach to professional teams that primarily use JavaScript, Python, or other ecosystems, but also have a lot of Ruby packages in their mix.
Today’s just the beginning. We’re excited to see how collaborating with grassroots, community-led organizations like Ruby Together will help make open source work better for everyone, improving the health and reliability of the open source infrastructure we all depend on.