Scarf, the company helping open source developers measure their software’s usage and connect with their commercial end-users, today exited stealth and announced Scarf Gateway, a secure central access point for software packages independent of a host registry, offering better analytics, eliminating vendor lock-in and reducing switching costs without impacting users.

According to the company, Scarf Gateway puts a project’s distribution and usage data back in the creator’s control. With seed funding from Wave Capital, 468 Capital, Scott Belsky and Kevin Hartz, Scarf said it aims to shift the power dynamics of open source by leading a new movement in open source sustainability.

Founded by Avi Press and Tim Dysinger, Scarf is creating a world where open source maintainers can proactively make data-informed decisions, and are fairly compensated for their work by connecting and supporting their commercial users.

Most registries today provide and show only download counts for packages. Scarf Gateway provides insight to developers on everything – downloads by version, platform, location, company, cloud environments, and much more.

Helping to permanently avoid vendor lock-in, distribution URLs stay static and under a developer’s control. Therefore, a developer can change out their registry provider as often as they’d like, without impacting users.

Scarf Gateway has initially launched with support for Docker containers, with more package types in the near future.