So open source contributors are not eligible? I know it's kind of petty to look at free stuff and go "but what about me?" But I got excited for no reason.
Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers
151–160 of 246 posts
Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s baffling to me that you can frame a $1200 gift to FOSS projects as “ugly”. I think it’s reasonable to grant humans agency. If they don’t want it they don’t have to take it. It’s pretty obviously a huge net positive.
What baffles to me is the people who think that "gifts" should never be criticized. I mean, suppose Adobe decides to gift "$1200" value in Adobe products/subscriptions to all subscribers of the gimp-users mailing list. Can I criticize that?
I’m sure you can; grumpy people can criticize anything.
I just think it’s a waste of emotional energy to get worked up about what’s very obviously a net positive.
And I did not say gifts should never be criticized; “here have this free crack cocaine” would obviously be immoral. Don’t do the HN overgeneralization thing.
Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers
#153I like what GitHub and Jetbrains are doing, where you get Copilot and PyCharm for free as long as you're a maintainer. They keep renewing my license. A 6-month trial isn't showing appreciation for OSS any more than "first crack hit's free" is showing appreciation for what a good person you are. It's just "you look like a promising customer".
GitHub also does it fully automatically (but they don't share explicit criteria).
Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers
#154They do require that you allow them to use your name publicly. They are silent on whether you can prohibit them from training on your input, so I assume you can. My guess is, if even 10% of maintainers forget to disable training, then Anthropic will have a most excellent source of how really good developers approach problems that can be fed back into the model. That could improve things for everyone. Of course, the w…
Of course they're going to train on open-source input (not like you could stop them). And of course they're also going to train on your private inputs. It's right there in the TOS.
> And of course they're also going to train on your private inputs. It's right there in the TOS.
Anthropic actually says they won't train on your private inputs on paid plans as long as you opted out. Unlike Google and OpenAI.
Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers
#155They do require that you allow them to use your name publicly. They are silent on whether you can prohibit them from training on your input, so I assume you can. My guess is, if even 10% of maintainers forget to disable training, then Anthropic will have a most excellent source of how really good developers approach problems that can be fed back into the model. That could improve things for everyone. Of course, the w…
> By accepting a Program subscription, you grant Anthropic permission to identify you publicly as a Program recipient, including by referencing your name, GitHub username, and associated open source project(s).
I was tempted about applying but that part is everything but nice and I think I'll just pass
Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers
#156At first I thought people here were being pretty unsympathetic to an early version of a beneficial program. I could see a company setting a 6-month timeline initially, so they can reevaluate the program and choose how to evolve their support for open source. I expected to see something along the lines of, "at the end of the 6 months we'll evaluate whether to continue your free plan." But no, they're quite explicit ab…
So put a reminder on your calendar to cancel. It's not hard. That shouldn't be a reason to pass this up.
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Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers
#157Folks saying this offer is in bad faith or not generous enough dont seem to understand how low the bar is here for rewarding maintainers.
I maintain Express.js and Lodash, as well as a number of express direct deps (as a TC member of both Express and Lodash).
OSS has been my fulltime focus for over a year (aka Im unemployed). In 2025 I made $10 from open source, in the form of an amazon gift card for fixing a bug in another random open source project (I think they have VC money).
Call it skill issue on my part, sure valid. But having a form that says “give us your email and handle, we can easily verify your contributions, and in exchange you get $200/month of value and we ask nothing of you” is the most generous gift Ive seen.
Is it enough to fix the well known power dynamics of OSS? Of course not. Is it cheap PR for Anthropic? Yes, as is every other corporate OSS fund initiative. Im not going to give them a standing ovation and a key to the city bc they cleared the extremely low bar.
My point is that, regardless of motives, from this maintainer’s perspective this is a kind offer which is respectful of me and my time. If you fall into the camp that training on OSS is stealing, I can see why youd think that this is a slap in the face. I personally do not see it that way, as my work is a conduit for me to serve millions Ill never meet, and what they do with my labor is not a personal concern. I do what I do because the process itself has value to me.
Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers
#158At first I thought people here were being pretty unsympathetic to an early version of a beneficial program. I could see a company setting a 6-month timeline initially, so they can reevaluate the program and choose how to evolve their support for open source. I expected to see something along the lines of, "at the end of the 6 months we'll evaluate whether to continue your free plan." But no, they're quite explicit ab…
> I could see a company setting a 6-month timeline initially, so they can reevaluate the program and choose how to evolve their support for open source.
There's nothing about this "for open source". This is for the celebrities of the open source world. "Use our product and let us advertise that you're using it." Nice try, but this is a pretty common marketing strategy, so no point pretending it's about supporting open source. A big name open source project adopting their products provides massive value to the company. Actual support would be giving access to the non-celebrities of the open source world.
Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers
#159Anthropic’s models have almost certainly gorged on an enormous amount of OSS, and if they think they can settle that debt with only six months of perks for the maintainers who’ve kept that ecosystem alive, it comes across as pretty arrogant.
Uncharitably, I think this is a strategy to gorge further especially if they select for higher quality open source. They are embracing the best to train off iteration patterns of the best, and have a semi self correcting slop mechanism. Charitably this will be great for open source software so... so long as they never moat up and lockdown.
Can't they just keep scraping these repositories for new data anyway? Or has that changed?
Re: Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers
#160Sorry we stole all your src code that you labored over for hours and hours of your life. Here’s a few bucks for 6 months to help train our model even more.
If richard stallman were dead (he's not), he'd be rolling over in his grave right now