TideLift for Apereo software products?

[Andrew Petro]

How might TideLift e.g. figure into the funding, sustainability of Apereo projects?

TideLift's model is something like:

1. Corporations pay for TideLift's subscription offering, which is a bundle of monitoring and analysis of dependencies and guarantees about (a subset of) the dependencies.
2. Open source software projects optionally agree to "Lift" their software products, which is to say fulfill certain guarantees about those software products.
3. Subscription fees flow down the dependency graph to "Lifted" open source software products, that is, to those projects that voluntarily made the relevant guarantees.
4. Of course, TideLift takes some cut off the top. :)

Here's what has me intrigued: the marginal cost of meeting the Lift guarantees beyond what Apereo projects are already doing might be pretty low. Guarantees so far might be about

• Release notes
  
• Licensing clarity
• Succession plan and expectations of product maintenance
  
• Handling of security vulnerability reports
• ...
  

that is, things Apereo projects are or probably ought to be on top of.

TideLift also envisions some kind of different levels, types of guarantees. So if TideLift's adopter market demands, say, rigor in securing ICLAs from contributors, well, this might be a way for Apereo to get more ROI from its differential investment in securing ICLAs vis a vis other open source software foundations.

Anyone else see some potential for potential in this?

-Andrew

[Jim Helwig]

Interesting business model. I hope it has legs! Regardless of our ability to be accepted and bundled, we should continue to increase our “guarantees”. 

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[Christian Murphy]

It's an interesting idea.

There are a number of initiative working to improve open source guarantees.

Another that looks promising is the core infrastructure initialize best practices badge, from the Linux Foundation https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org

Best Regards,

Christian Murphy

[Neal Caidin]

Here is an announcement by our friends at OSI , from just a couple of days ago. Sounds related.

https://opensource.org/clearlydefined

-- Neal

[Jim Helwig]

Shoji,

The idea is that Apereo projects could register with TideLift and if the projects were included in some bundle that others subscribed to, a certain portion of the subscription fees would trickle down to the Apereo projects. We would be engaging as open source projects, not as a for profit entity.

JimH

On Mar 7, 2018, at 16:13, Shoji Kajita <kajita....@kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:

Hi Jim,

It is very interesting business model. But Apereo Foundation is a non-profit organization.

Do we need to launch “Apereo Co.” as our for-profit organization to realize the business model of TideLift?

Shoji

[Andrew Petro]

Neat.

Note alignment with (draft) Apereo strategic goal #3 re light touch framework for transparency into health of Apereo projects and products.

TideLift, best-practices-badges, ClearlyDefined : these may be (parts of) the light touch framework fulfilling this goal.

-Andrew