Tidelift Press Releases

Tidelift and Ruby Together collaborate to support critical open source infrastructure via the Tidelift Subscription

Written by Chris Grams | July 17, 2019

Maintainers of widely used Ruby projects, including the Bundler gem installer, are now backing their projects as a part of Tidelift’s managed open source subscription

BOSTON, July 17, 2019Tidelift and Ruby Together today announced a collaboration to support essential open source infrastructure projects maintained by the non-profit Ruby community initiative. Tidelift now provides recurring income to Ruby Together to pay the maintainers of vital projects, enabling them to manage the projects to standards that support the work of enterprise software development teams. In addition, Tidelift’s managed open source subscription customers will receive maintenance, security, and licensing assurances for key projects supported by Ruby Together.

Ruby Together is a grassroots initiative working to improve infrastructure like Bundler, the gem installer used ubiquitously in the Ruby community; RubyGems, the library behind all Ruby software packages; and RubyGems.org, a service that has provided billions of gem downloads to the entire Ruby community. The creators who know these Ruby projects the best join the maintainers of more than 1,000 other widely used open source projects in backing their work through the Tidelift Subscription.

“The mission of Ruby Together is to maintain and develop the open source software that’s integral to the work of the thousands of developers who rely on the Ruby language,” said André Arko, executive director at Ruby Together. “Collaborating with Tidelift will help us continue to improve Bundler, as well as gem tools and documentation, for the benefit of the entire Ruby ecosystem.”

“Supporting the critical infrastructure of open source and our digital world is a goal we share with Ruby Together—that’s why we’re committed to paying the creators and maintainers of all open source projects our subscribers use,” said Donald Fischer, CEO and co-founder of Tidelift. “Providing a consistent revenue stream to the experts behind Ruby software will help keep the code secure and well maintained, enabling businesses to build with it confidently.”

Most professional applications today are created using open source components, typically with hundreds of dependencies on other projects and libraries. Many of these components have no one being paid to keep them professionally maintained, so corporate teams must invest time in managing these components themselves and assume risk for anything that might go wrong.

Managed open source addresses this systemic problem to help teams become more productive and allow them to stay focused on developing their own apps—not the underlying open source infrastructure components. 

Through the Tidelift Subscription, companies get help identifying the open source software in their apps, understanding potential issues in those components, working with a network of open source maintainers to resolve issues, and choosing the best and most reliable packages to include in their apps. The Tidelift Subscription helps organizations use open source more effectively, while paying maintainers for the immense value they create.

About Ruby Together

Ruby Together is dedicated to sustaining and improving the tools and infrastructure of the Ruby programming language. For more: rubytogether.org/

About Tidelift

Tidelift makes open source work better—for everyone. Through the Tidelift Subscription and in direct partnership with maintainers, Tidelift is a single source for proactively managed open source components and professional assurances around those components. Tidelift makes it possible for open source projects to thrive, so we can all create even more incredible software, even faster. For more: tidelift.com

Media Contact

Chris Grams

Head of Marketing, Tidelift

Email: press@tidelift.com

Phone: 919-523-2388