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.

But no, they're quite explicit about this being nothing more than a way to try to get paid subscriptions from open source maintainers:

> Your complimentary subscription will expire at the end of the Benefit Period. After expiration, any existing subscription will continue unless you cancel. You may independently choose to purchase a paid Claude subscription at the then-current price through Anthropic’s standard signup process.

So anyone who participates in this will need to remember to opt out six months from now, or suddenly find themselves with invoices at the max 20x level.

That's pretty ugly.

Edit: I believe I misread the terms. As mwigdahl points out below: "If you have an existing subscription, it pauses while the free period is active. After that free period, your existing subscription resumes. As I read it, there is no "auto-subscribe" after the free period ends -- you just revert back to whatever you had before (or nothing, if you weren't a subscriber before)."

https://www.anthropic.com/claude-for-oss-terms

I've been an open source maintainer of one of the biggest open source projects in the world[1], and it wouldn't fill any of these requirements. Anybody else hates it that now "open source" is conflated with Github (a private company, itself not open source) popularity?

[1]: https://www.openstack.org/

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".

But it's funny how their methods end up appearing so close to the loss-leader tactics that everyone (including themselves with the double holiday Opus limits and $50 extra usage) is doling out to ultimately selfishly make more money.

How many total developers does that cover? 100? How many of them aren't already corporate employees?

And also

> 6 months of free Claude Max 20x

So basically a free trial.

When Github Copilot first launched they gave Pro subscriptions to everyone that regularly committed to a public repo, regardless of the number of stars or downloads, and kept renewing it indefinitely. I don't know if that program is still around but it was amazing to get to try out some early LLM coding tools for open source development.

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 whole purpose of a trial is to induce dependence on the service. Let’s hope that doesn’t reduce the skill of those maintainers. If open source code gets better as a result, that’s good for all.

I previously ignored a free offer when Claude reached out to me as an open source maintainer as it was a glorified free trial. I hope this one continues beyond the listed 6 months, I am not interested in a glorified free trial and if it requires entering credit card details I won't be signing up.

pour one out for us gitlab users :(

As a tinnnyy plug, I’ve ran OSS sponsorship programs before for companies. One thing that I always hated was the sales contact process to get it. So, for Vizzly I made it 100% automated. Sign up, connect an OSS public repo, get a free plan. https://vizzly.dev/open-source/ I don’t wanna talk to you and you don’t wanna talk to me (for this :p)

EDIT: Just another test, one of the most used codes in astro -- an ensemble Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo sampler https://github.com/dfm/emcee has 1600 stars. It just shows the 5000 stars is a bit PR, rather than a serious attempt to help open source.

Plus, while 6 months is better than 1 month, why isn't it a recurring deal (or token-limited), which renews after check-ins (like educational discounts do). This sounds like an Apple TV+ offer you get for every Apple product you buy. A hook, more than a treat.

In this case, I guess it's just a slimy approach to building a self-selected lead list of people you can hard-hit with upsells after the 6 months.

Thank you for everything you ship*

*there's a 6 months limit we have on gratitute.

Right, because Node is the only package ecosystem.

No, thanks. I decided I don't want to play those games. I get MiniMax unlimited for 10$ per month, and free GitHub Copilot as an open source maintainer and contributor.

I don't need to beg to get some free stuff, only to later realize the only way to use it is through the shitty Claude Code.

What if we get proven code some other way?

Give our tools for free to prove their worth

No one will guess this is astroturf

A special program, with a special account

To get labeled data worth a big amount

Sad day. I hope so they are gonna change the TOS and punish anyone with a 1 million $ fine if someone lies.

That's the only way: criminal charges for students using AI(when forbidden such as academia) and people who plan to abuse it (stealing tokens against TOS).

it's impossible to compete with cheaters and with cheaters who stole money

Sincerely,

Sales & Marketing

–Ackbar, open source software maintainer

I went for their 100 USD paid tier and it's honestly been immensely useful (Claude Code with the desktop UI with multiple parallel tasks), I've done more and with better quality in the past few weeks than others do in a month - maybe I just got lucky with the domain but it really is a force multiplier and I'm working on like 4 projects in parallel at work and am crushing it, being overworked aside.

Finally I also have enough capacity for various side projects and utility tools/scripts, or at least I will until I burn out, but that's not really the fault of the tool, rather the amount of work.

Being able to throw the latest Opus model at every problem is also really, really nice. Way better than any of the slop before.

It also makes sense to give tools for open source developers. Sometimes we need to test compatibility (does my repo play nice with that harness/ide/etc?). This in turn makes that repo be more solid for the paid tool, which is a potential way of attracting users for both. It has been done by others (like JetBrains IDEs).

There's nothing wrong with taking advantage of limited offers.

Laughable.

This is a tiny, if even unimportant, fraction of the FOSS community that runs the modern tech stack.

Your CEO has bragged multiple times how your tool will make me unemployed. Why would I participate in that?

You stole my code without attribution. Why should I use the services of a copyright infringer?

Sad day. I hope so they are gonna change the TOS and punish anyone with a 1 million $ fine if someone lies.

That's the only way: criminal charges for students using AI(when forbidden such as academia) and people who plan to abuse it (stealing tokens against TOS).

it's impossible to compete with cheaters and with cheaters who stole moneyl