In a statement, the company said Scarf Gateway would provide a secure central access point for software packages independent of a host registry. Better analytics, elimination of vendor lock-in and the reduction of switching costs were other benefits that were promised.
Scarf Gateway has received seed funding from Wave Capital, 468 Capital, Scott Belsky and Kevin Hartz.
Scarf was founded by Avi Press and Tim Dysinger. Press said: "We believe that the open-source community as a whole should not only be sharing source code, but also data about that source code and how it is used.
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The Scarf statement said most registries provided and showed only download counts for packages. Scarf Gateway would provide insight to developers on everything - downloads by version, platform, location, company, cloud environments, and much more.
The Gateway would host containers and packages on their own domain, helping to permanently avoid vendor lock-in, keep distribution URLs static and under a developer's control.
This meant a developer could change a registry provider as often as needed without any impact on users.
"Running the Data Science team at Airbnb, I relied heavily on the open source community," said Riley Newman, general partner at Wave Capital.
"Scarf is a brilliant concept for a marketplace that will open up a new channel for enterprise SaaS, with developers able to get paid for the projects they're passionate about and companies able to receive custom support and ongoing maintenance for mission-critical software."
Scarf will initially have support for Docker containers and add other package types later.