Support Jackson development with Tidelift OSS Subscription
This blog post is a first for me.
I have never asked for financial support for any of the OSS libraries I have written, maintained. Ever.
But now I ask for users of my most visible Open Source projects — especially Jackson (*) — to consider supporting my development efforts and project maintenance (**). This is easy (***) to do via Tidelift subscription: you can find it under “Sponsor” link on Github repos like jackson-databind.
See “Our Mission” and “Java Enterprise Solutions” for more details on what subscribers get. You may also want to read “For Maintainers” to see what is in it for me, as the maintainer.
TL;DNR; Jackson project gets a share of subscription fees Tidelift collects, based on relative usage of Jackson amongst Tidelift supported OSS libraries.
I realize that this method of support is not practical for everyone: it is geared towards larger enterprises. Because of this not everyone can (or wants to) support Jackson project this way. But I would like all users to at least have a look, be aware of this option and — if you think it is reasonable — pass this information along. Based on wide usage of Jackson I believe there is enough user base for the subscription income to help future development. I will write more about my thoughts in this area in a future post or two.
Finally, all existing methods of support — bug reports, code contributions, advocacy, constructive feedback, kind words — are still as useful and valued as ever. Jackson project (and friends) is only as good as the community that supports it, uses it, pushes it further.
Thank you for your time,
Tatu aka @cowtowncoder
(*) but also Woodstox and Aalto (XML parsers), Java UUID generator and Java ClassMate (generic type introspection).
(**) releasing new Jackson minor version is typically half a day’s work, patch versions multiple hours as well; maintaining release notes, reviewing bug reports, pull request all take time
(**) or so I have been told — I am interested in hearing about actual user experiences
