Tidelift Inc. is raising $15 million as it looks to boost its unique open-source software model that sees companies pay for professional support of their favorite projects, allowing those that maintain them to get compensated too.

The Series A round was led by the investment firms General Catalyst and Foundry Group, as well as former Red Hat Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Matthew Szulik. The company was able to attract the investment after coming up with a novel idea for maintaining the most popular open-source software projects in a way that benefits both the users and those who help to create them.

It works like this: Companies pay a subscription fee that entitles them to professional-grade support, similar to the kind of commercial subscriptions offered by firms such as Red Hat, Cloudera Inc. and Docker Inc. A part of these fees are then used to pay the developers who maintain the software. The net result, at least in theory, is that everyone is happy, as companies enjoy the benefits of professional support at lower rates than they might expect from an established firm, and the developers of the software are finally rewarded for their efforts.

Tidelift reckons there’s a big demand for this kind of service, since it said there’s no form of commercial support available for the vast majority of open-source software projects outside the big ones such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Docker and so on. It also points to a recent survey it conducted that shows open-source code is currently used in over 90 percent of commercial software projects. The same survey also found that 83 percent of commercial users would be willing to pay for professionally-maintained open-source components.

“Open source is amazing, but there is an opportunity to make it even better,” said Tidelift Chief Executive Donald Fischer. “With Tidelift, development teams get dependable open-source software for a reasonable price, while open-source maintainers make good money doing work they love.”

When Tidelift’s customers buy a subscription, not only do they get the professional support for the components they need, but also an easier way to manage all of their open-source dependencies with greater detail about how widely they are used, how well supported they are, and whether there are other options available.

As for the developers, they get paid directly according to how much they contribute to the specific projects they work on. “Tidelift tracks which open source components its subscribers use, and directs subscription payments to participating maintainers of those open source projects, aligning everyone’s interests,” Fischer told SiliconANGLE. “Subscribers get better maintained software, and maintainers get paid, so it’s a win-win. Our goal is to pay out at least half, and ideally more of subscription revenue to open source maintainers.”

Tidelift also maintains its own open-source project, called Libraries.io, which tracks more than 2.6 million other open-source projects for which it can provide commercial support.

“Today the subscription model is the de facto standard for buying and consuming software,” Szulik said in a statement. “Tidelift has the opportunity to lead us into a new model, covering the rest of open source and lifting everyone.”

Image: Tidelift