Tidelift for five packages I maintain

Since December, several of my open source packages have been “lifted” on Tidelift. This means that Tidelift are paying me a portion of their subscription fee for continued, standardized maintenance of these packages. These funds are very appreciated, so thanks to Tidelift subscribers 🫡.

The five packages that are now “lifted” are:

• django-cors-headers

  Support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) in Django.

  I took over maintenance of this package in 2016 from its creator, Otto Yiu. 18% of Django developers rank it in their 5 favourite third party packages, according to the Django Developer Survey 2021.

• django-mysql

  Extensions to Django for use with MySQL/MariaDB.

  This is my original Django package. Its existence is what prompted Josh Smeaton to invite me become a “Django core developer” and take a more active role in Django itself 😊. I’m glad that others are still finding it useful. Its faster database cache is something I’d like to extend to other database backends.

• ec2-metadata

  An easy interface to query the EC2 metadata API, with caching.

  I created this to fill in a gap in AWS’ packages: the original boto had a metadata API interafce, whilst its replacement boto3 does not. It seems it has some popularity, more than I expected, for those automating things on EC2.

• time-machine

  Travel through time in your tests.

  I created this testing library back in 2020 as a faster replacement for “freezegun”. It’s not as popular (yet) but I’m glad to see it has enough usage to be “lifted”.

• whitenoise

  Radically simplified static file serving for Python web apps.

  Whitenoise was created by Dave Evans in 2013 and has improved static files for many Django apps since. I was added as a maintainer in 2022, and I got to start making many updates and releasing version 6. I’m glad to say that Dave and I are splitting the Tidelift income 50/50.

Tidelift is paying their minimum tier for each package, $100/month. With a 50% split on Whitenoise, this means Adam’s Web Services is now making $450/month for open source maintenance 😀. This isn’t quite as much as one day of client work, but it definitely helps to me to justify spending time on open source.

So if your organization wants to support open source packages further, do check out Tidelift. Or if you want to support me directly, you can always buy a book or two.

Learn how to make your tests run quickly in my book Speed Up Your Django Tests.

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