| I would say that we collect money on behalf of the companies who buy an enterprise maintenance subscription from us, and we agree to provide those maintenance services. So far this is what many OSS businesses do. But while existing OSS businesses hire 100% their own staff to then provide the service, we split our revenue with interested maintainers who want to help provide the service. We are creating an opportunity for upstream projects to participate directly _if they want to_. If they don't want to, then no problem! The beneficiaries are: subscribing companies get an enterprise maintenance service for their dependencies; participating maintainers get paid a revenue share (royalty-style model) for doing work on their project. Tidelift's share of revenue mostly is not profit. It's analogous to what any software vendor would pay for the nontechnical roles at the company. https://tidelift.com/docs/lifting/paying goes into more detail on that. It is worth spending money on sales, because even though it lowers the _percentage_ of revenue going to engineering, it increases the _amount_ of revenue going to engineering. Businesses spend money on sales/marketing/finance/ops because it results in more money overall. The same math applies to Tidelift. All other open source vendors give maintainers a 0% cut, though the best ones do add a lot of "in kind" value in the form of contributions, those contributions often actually create more work for the primary maintainers, and everyone ends up bottlenecking on those overworked maintainers. Tidelift is not a money transfer or donation system. It's a commercial service provided in cooperation with interested upstream projects. |