I've been doing a tiny bit of consulting for Tidelift for a little over a year now, mainly talking about them to open source maintainers in the Python world and vice versa. (See my October 2018 piece "Tidelift Is Paying Maintainers And, Potentially, Fixing the Economics of an Industry".) And lo, in my household, my spouse Leonard Richardson has signed up as a lifter for Beautiful Soup, his library that helps you with screen-scraping projects.

Leonard writes:

There was a period of about a year in 2017-2018 when I wasn't interested in doing Beautiful Soup work, but Tidelift changed that. Tidelift gathers subscription money from companies that rely on free software, and distributes the money to the developers in exchange for a level of support that I find sustainable.

Nobody builds an entire product around Beautiful Soup (or at least nobody will admit do doing this), but thousands of people have used Beautiful Soup to save time at their day jobs. Bundling Beautiful Soup together with bigger projects like Flask and numpy is a solution that works really well for me.

The other day I looked at the list of featured supported packages and was happy to see that a bunch of Python projects have signed up as lifters, including SciPy and numpy, Flask, setuptools, Werkzeug, websockets, urllib3, celery, coverage, a bunch of Django packages, Jinja2, keyring, Pylint, coverage, and pytest. And I think over the next 6-12 months we're going to see some effects of Tidelift support -- not just in the security and release cadences of the supported projects, but on other issues stemming from unfairness and a lack of reciprocity in open source, like maintainer burnout and expectation-setting. The list of licensing, security, maintenance, and marketing tasks lifters agree to do may end up being a benchmark, like the open source Independent Verification & Validation checklist by Open Tech Strategies, that even non-lifter maintainers use to set realistic expectations for what "supported"/"maintained" means.