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kelnos 6 hours ago [-]
Same as Anthropic's similar offer, they're only giving 6 months free. This really just feels like a way to get OSS maintainers hooked so they buy subscriptions after the free period is over.
If they were really serious about supporting OSS, they'd offer it for free perpetually (well, with periodic checks to ensure the maintainers are still affiliated with the project). Anything less just makes it look like a marketing stunt.
And also, dumb how Github-centric this is, same as Anthropic's signup form. Most of my OSS contributions aren't on Github. Guess that means the projects I've worked on don't matter.
ACCount37 3 hours ago [-]
The bulk of open source development is (still?) on Github.
It's not like the Linux kernel isn't real. It's just that the kind of people who write Linux kernel patches and get them accepted are, in the eyes of an average open source developer, somewhere between "majestic magical creatures" and "madmen".
dominotw 7 minutes ago [-]
is there any company or product that donates their subscription service free forever ?
petesergeant 6 hours ago [-]
Presumably it's also sessions that they will absolutely use as training data?
bibryam 5 minutes ago [-]
A few AI companies giving free stuff to OSS maintainers
- Dosu
- CodeRabbit
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
I applied for my oss project Filestash which satisfy all their criterias but never heard back despite the project having millions of users, more than 14000 stars on github and representing more work than a single person can cope with
overfeed 6 hours ago [-]
I doubt considerations are based on need. Filestash is cool, but probably isn't the marquee marketing opportunity they are looking for; it jas to be a household name they can name-drop or place a logo on a marketing page and get instant street-cred "${AI_MODEL}: Used* by the React project in 95% of PRs closed last quarter"
ternaus 2 hours ago [-]
Same here, 15k stars, 150M downloads and never heard back.
huflungdung 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rmast 12 hours ago [-]
I applied for both. Heard back from neither. Mentioned two particular projects when applying, one with 2k stars and 5M monthly downloads, and another with 2M monthly downloads.
matheusmoreira 8 hours ago [-]
Now I'm wondering what the bar is since even people with millions of users aren't making the cut. I'm orders of magnitude smaller but I signed up too since I had nothing to lose. Didn't get a response, of course.
adrithmetiqa 4 hours ago [-]
Is it possible this is vapour marketing and no projects are actually being selected?
Perhaps someone from a project who has heard back can respond here?
zmmmmm 15 hours ago [-]
Seems rather stingy - 6 months is barely longer than you will get on a free signup deal for a lot of online products anyway. Kind of worse than nothing if it causes you to adopt work patterns that aren't sustainable for the project after the offer ends.
EduardoBautista 14 hours ago [-]
Which online product gives away 6 months of a $100 per month subscription?
mqus 4 hours ago [-]
Jetbrains gives away for free infinity years of a $180+ per year subscription (its more expensive in the first year or for orgs)[1] for open source authors, students, and more. Sure, the per-month price tag is not as high but after year 4 you saved much more.
Though it doesn't cost them anything of note to provide this other than maybe some lost sales to devs who would have bought it.
LoganDark 2 hours ago [-]
After using JetBrains IDEs for years I can hardly really get into anything that isn't vertically integrated. Language servers are THE WORST -- I love Zed but only use it for things that don't require language integration at all.
It's like how after using Apple hardware for years I couldn't put up with most Windows laptops -- either they were HiDPI ultrabooks with no performance or they were sloppy gamer machines with no class.
Learning JetBrains gets you hooked.
HatchedLake721 13 hours ago [-]
Every 2nd SaaS with a startup plan? I used intercom/customer.io/segment/amplitude/mixpanel for free for a year.
pastel8739 9 hours ago [-]
The marginal cost of all of those is definitely much lower than for Codex, though
olzhasar 7 hours ago [-]
An online product that was brought into existence by processing all the open source software in the world and makes money by selling the resulting knowledge base, should be accessible free of charge by the producers of that open source software.
runlevel1 12 hours ago [-]
The price might be more commoditized if OpenAI kept true to the original mission that lives on, albeit vestigially, in their name.
zzyxy 7 hours ago [-]
Make it $200/month subscription which actually gives you access to O($1K) worth of codex compute. Even at the face value it is very generous, IMO.
wodenokoto 13 hours ago [-]
6 email addresses gives you 6 one months trials …
tclancy 13 hours ago [-]
Where am I going to find multiple+email@adress.es?
manquer 12 hours ago [-]
Using a plus sign is subaddressing [1] and most ESPs[2] will route to the main address ( multiple@addre.es) . So you can use use multiple+email@adress.es, multiple+xyz@adress.es and both will route the email to you.
In my experience most SaaS apps do not filter this out and allow re-sign ups with sub-addresses.
Gmail has an additional behavior that dot character is ignored in local component of the address . multiple@gmail.com, mult.iple@gmail.com mult.ip.le@gmail.com all route to the same inbox as well.
This is not true (anymore?). I have a rather unfortunate exact naming collision with a family member. They use the full name without dot for the local gmail component, I use a dot between the first and last name.
Two or three mails have been misplaced in a decade.
It would be feasible to change something like that without breaking security now.
Google can hardly start allowing/routing a new account for first.last@gmail.com when you were getting it for years even though your account is firstlast@gmail.com and sensitive communication like say from your bank would routed there.
Groxx 13 hours ago [-]
One can consult the oracle, /dev/random
maybe_pablo 10 hours ago [-]
icloud+ hide my email for $0.99
Supermancho 11 hours ago [-]
you need a non-voip phone number for codex SMS now, as well.
testfrequency 6 hours ago [-]
This. I tried even tried signing up with my paid business line and it denied me due to VoIP.
gruez 10 hours ago [-]
Since when did they have trials?
wodenokoto 10 hours ago [-]
I’m running on my 3rd codex trial and have had a month of Gemini Pro. I think Claude is the only one without trials.
9 hours ago [-]
throwitaway222 14 hours ago [-]
That's what I was thinking, but the downvoters are hunting today.
cush 7 hours ago [-]
No good deed goes unpunished
jiggawatts 6 hours ago [-]
They're doing everything possible to drive up their MAU before their IPO.
14 hours ago [-]
vldszn 16 hours ago [-]
I applied for the first time a couple of months ago and again this month, but unfortunately I haven’t heard back from them :(
I’m building EasyInvoicePDF - a free and open-source invoice generator. (900+ GitHub stars, 2k monthly users on average, 10k total invoices downloaded)
If you only give 6mo then this is the opposite of a commitment to open source it’s a drug dealers tactic of giving the first taste for free.
georgemcbay 11 hours ago [-]
> If you only give 6mo then this is the opposite of a commitment to open source it’s a drug dealers tactic of giving the first taste for free.
Its arguably even more self-serving than the drug dealer tactic because of the feedback loop involved (if you use it to maintain your open source project, OpenAI will surely use that new code [along with all the existing code in your project] to train future models).
So it would be like if the drug dealer gave you the first taste for free and also the drug caused you to shit out more drugs and the drug dealer harvested your shit to sell to both future you plus other people.
KetoManx64 6 hours ago [-]
Very vivid analogy that I'm never going to forget now.
altmanaltman 9 hours ago [-]
drug dealers should teach MBA classes at this point - so many strategies pioneered by them get used by large tech companies
metalspot 1 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't use anything but open weights models for developing open source software. This is just training OpenAI and Anthropic to steal your work for their proprietary models.
maccard 29 minutes ago [-]
If your license is open then Anthropic and OpenAI are using your work anyway.
metalspot 24 minutes ago [-]
the user prompts and harness used for development are much more valuable for training than the final source code.
my approach to open source development with AI now is to include all of the agent sessions used in development in the repository, which makes this data freely available for training for both proprietary and open weights models, but that is just my own approach. every open source developer ultimately has to make their own judgement on the best way to integrate AI in accordance with their values.
_the_inflator 44 minutes ago [-]
The crux of open source: per definition it is opened for the public to use it.
I see it as a chance. Many OS projects themselves offer LLM readable websites, their docs.
This way the project at least not only gets ingested but receives referential treatment.
Some sort of collaboration. Ingested it will be, anyway.
metalspot 11 minutes ago [-]
> I see it as a chance
absolutely. AI is the same as any other software, and open source has to integrate, adapt, and lead to make sure that open source values continue to propagate.
my personal approach is to focus on developing with open weights models, so that my work is optimized for them, and leads to their development. proprietary labs are free to copy, but they have a structural cost disadvantage. my objective is that open weights models remain competitive on capability but lead on capability/cost.
Isn't the thing open source and governed by its own license?
arjie 16 hours ago [-]
That is interesting. I would have thought they had that right without needing to add it to the ToS.
gruez 10 hours ago [-]
It's better to have something in writing than to possibly have lawyers argue over it in court.
ilia-a 17 hours ago [-]
I did fill the form our a while back (it was around for a few months now) without any response. I guess must be really big OSS project for maintainer to qualify.
spooneybarger 16 hours ago [-]
Same. But I got one from Anthropic.
MeetingsBrowser 17 hours ago [-]
What project did you apply for?
ilia-a 16 hours ago [-]
PHP
jstummbillig 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
arcanemachiner 13 hours ago [-]
If you harass the right person on Twitter, you could probably get that ball rolling a little faster.
colinsane 15 hours ago [-]
a huge aspect of open source is the user -> contributor -> maintainer pipeline. maybe they mean well, but in fact they're constructing a wall between those last two groups.
especially in larger projects where maintainership duties are heavily delegated, the last thing i want is some tool that can only be used by me, because suddenly i can no longer share the workload that tool targets with people who aren't "technically" maintainers.
ramon156 40 minutes ago [-]
First hit's free
breve 3 hours ago [-]
What are AI companies doing to respect open source licenses and copyright?
I'm sure they train their models on open source software, so how do I know that LLM generated code doesn't reproduce substantial chunks of, for example, GPL licensed code? If indeed there are GPL violations, what are AI companies doing to police themselves?
I wonder if open source licenses will start to include "not to be used for LLM training" clauses.
sofixa 2 hours ago [-]
> I wonder if open source licenses will start to include "not to be used for LLM training" clauses
As if the LLM trainers would care. They've ignored every single license and copyright policy out there because "fair transformative use". It's undergoing litigation in various jurisdictions, and the chaotic side of me really wants to see what happens if a UK or California decide that training an LLM on pirated copyrighted material is not fair use, and the rights holders have to be compensated.
28304283409234 16 hours ago [-]
6 whole months?! Gee golly thanks mister!
hnthrow10282910 16 hours ago [-]
Agreed. Seems like it should be indefinite given they created a multi billion dollar company off the backs of these maintainers dedicating their hard earned timed for free to begin with and then trained models against their code.
IMO this is an insult if anything
nish__ 12 hours ago [-]
Especially considering they trained the damn thing on our code.
baq 6 hours ago [-]
Do you complain to the bank that credit cards have expiration dates or to the government that passports also do?
LtWorf 6 hours ago [-]
The bank mails me a new one automatically.
julianlam 26 minutes ago [-]
6 months is a joke.
Companies a thousandth their size are giving free or at-cost access for OSS projects.
drw 17 hours ago [-]
Mycli (https://github.com/dbcli/mycli) is a happy recipient of sponsorship from this program. OpenAI asked for nothing in return; not even a link.
mrgoldenbrown 15 hours ago [-]
Are you saying they aren't getting training data from you?
drw 14 hours ago [-]
I'm sure they are getting training data! But it is hands-off otherwise.
tclancy 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
2001zhaozhao 17 hours ago [-]
I think programs like this are cool, the company gets to promote their product and do good at the same time. This looks like a broader program than past ones and giving out GPT5.5 could be meaningful in improving open-source projects' security.
No, he didn't? He predicted that third parties would donate tokens to FOSS projects, not that the labs would. One is PR that started ages ago, the other is a reasonable prediction of where the world is going.
goodroot 13 hours ago [-]
Not quite donate tokens directly (technically and practically weird), but donation -> compute has been out for a couple months on opub.dev (disclaimer, built it). So his prediction was somewhat correct if not late!
jasonjmcghee 16 hours ago [-]
They’ve been doing this since at least March
vintagedave 2 days ago [-]
I wonder how well this supports niche languages. There's an indication there for stars or other signals of importance to 'the ecosystem'; that could match the Big Libraries but likely not ones for small languages.
monster_truck 17 hours ago [-]
How is this different from https://openai.com/form/codex-open-source-fund/ and are the winners listed anywhere? I've only ever seen devs say it isn't worth bothering, many of which I would've expected to be shoe ins for something like this.
and both of them generally don't work unless you have bought many github stars
winfredJa 17 hours ago [-]
my guess is they get high quality training data.
measurablefunc 17 hours ago [-]
This is correct. The most valuable form of data for any AI company is corrective feedback from real use cases.
jeena 5 hours ago [-]
I like that a project only qualifies if it's hosted on GitHub.
TZubiri 3 hours ago [-]
What a visionary Stallman was.
einpoklum 6 hours ago [-]
"Critical open source software" should not, and maybe cannot, be maintained with its development requiring huge commercial-corporate infrastructure in the form of OpenAI's LLMs.
It should be maintained by humans, relying on widely available hardware and software, requiring little of both.
Not saying that using LLMs as a convenience is forbidden or anything, but the direction is problematic.
(Also, this sounds like a cheap alternative to actually funding FOSS work.)
vinhnx 15 hours ago [-]
Applied in March when it first launched for VT Code, a Rust-based terminal coding agent, but haven't heard back from OpenAI. The bar seems high, which makes sense given the fund's limited scope and requirements.
3 hours ago [-]
purpleidea 11 hours ago [-]
The difference between this one (good) and the Anthropic program (bad) is that openai doesn't force you into a marketing clause while Anthropic does.
I mean seriously, you already ripped off all the worlds open source code. Be more generous and don't demand anything else back. Six months is so little too.
tuananh 13 hours ago [-]
a very good way of collecting high quality training data.
i imagine the usage from maintainers of high quality projects are excellent training data. much better than average joe
akoboldfrying 4 hours ago [-]
The amount of gift-horse-mouth-looking in this thread is amazing to me.
How dare they only give me this much free stuff! I want that much free stuff!
ahartmetz 2 hours ago [-]
I want my license fee from my software that they trained their models on.
(Actually I don't, I want their stuff as Free Software and I mean everything, training data, pipelines and all)
holografix 10 hours ago [-]
Nice way of guaranteeing access to source code as training material and intelligence gathering
ev3lynx727 10 hours ago [-]
These grant programs feel inconsistent—sometimes they genuinely help OSS, other times they look more like marketing. Hard to tell where the balance really lies.
wseqyrku 10 hours ago [-]
When in doubt, go with marketing. There are things that are 'just marketing' you wouldn't believe.
akoboldfrying 4 hours ago [-]
> sometimes they genuinely help OSS, other times they look more like marketing
Whenever companies do things like this, it's both, or at least trying hard to be. To the extent that it's perceived by developers (that is, potential OpenAI customers) as helping OSS, it's effective marketing. This perception may or may not correspond to reality.
2 days ago [-]
emsign 4 hours ago [-]
They are coming for the repositories now.
agentifysh 9 hours ago [-]
just applied
I've forked tensorzero after they archived the repo and will be updating and fixing issues going forward.
The Axios article[1] I read says "calls from Amazon — as well as at least five other companies to a variety of senior administration officials Thursday evening and Friday morning — led to the model being shut down by Friday night".
Yes, Amazon is the only company named, but would anyone be surprised if OpenAI was one of the other five companies? It's hard to imagine a company that would materially benefit more from this event.
The evidence is circumstantial, of course, but can you blame people for making a connection?
They give out the subscription by default, and if they find your use case interesting enough they'll give you credits. Not sure if there's an upper limit, but I would be surprised if it's more than a few hundred dollars a month.
(no internal knowledge, this is based on my experience with explainshell.com, thanks OAI!)
dartharva 10 hours ago [-]
On a side note, am I the only one who feels Codex models have a higher general first-pass success rate than Claude models on coding what you want? I use Github Copilot and always find myself drifting more towards them when working.
ashish296 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
verdyshd 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ameon 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ReptileMan 17 hours ago [-]
The moment a corporation starts to endorse open source is the moment they admit they know that are behind.
SweetSoftPillow 17 hours ago [-]
Anthropic published essentially the same offering recently. By your logic, does that mean they're behind too?
If they were really serious about supporting OSS, they'd offer it for free perpetually (well, with periodic checks to ensure the maintainers are still affiliated with the project). Anything less just makes it look like a marketing stunt.
And also, dumb how Github-centric this is, same as Anthropic's signup form. Most of my OSS contributions aren't on Github. Guess that means the projects I've worked on don't matter.
It's not like the Linux kernel isn't real. It's just that the kind of people who write Linux kernel patches and get them accepted are, in the eyes of an average open source developer, somewhere between "majestic magical creatures" and "madmen".
https://www.oss.fund/explore/?pillar=operational-support&cat...
[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/store/?section=students&billing=ye...
It's like how after using Apple hardware for years I couldn't put up with most Windows laptops -- either they were HiDPI ultrabooks with no performance or they were sloppy gamer machines with no class.
Learning JetBrains gets you hooked.
In my experience most SaaS apps do not filter this out and allow re-sign ups with sub-addresses.
Gmail has an additional behavior that dot character is ignored in local component of the address . multiple@gmail.com, mult.iple@gmail.com mult.ip.le@gmail.com all route to the same inbox as well.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5233 [2] Less common in work hosted ESPs but almost universally default enabled in public ESPs for consumers.
Two or three mails have been misplaced in a decade.
It would be feasible to change something like that without breaking security now.
Google can hardly start allowing/routing a new account for first.last@gmail.com when you were getting it for years even though your account is firstlast@gmail.com and sensitive communication like say from your bank would routed there.
I’m building EasyInvoicePDF - a free and open-source invoice generator. (900+ GitHub stars, 2k monthly users on average, 10k total invoices downloaded)
https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
Its arguably even more self-serving than the drug dealer tactic because of the feedback loop involved (if you use it to maintain your open source project, OpenAI will surely use that new code [along with all the existing code in your project] to train future models).
So it would be like if the drug dealer gave you the first taste for free and also the drug caused you to shit out more drugs and the drug dealer harvested your shit to sell to both future you plus other people.
my approach to open source development with AI now is to include all of the agent sessions used in development in the repository, which makes this data freely available for training for both proprietary and open weights models, but that is just my own approach. every open source developer ultimately has to make their own judgement on the best way to integrate AI in accordance with their values.
I see it as a chance. Many OS projects themselves offer LLM readable websites, their docs.
This way the project at least not only gets ingested but receives referential treatment.
Some sort of collaboration. Ingested it will be, anyway.
absolutely. AI is the same as any other software, and open source has to integrate, adapt, and lead to make sure that open source values continue to propagate.
my personal approach is to focus on developing with open weights models, so that my work is optimized for them, and leads to their development. proprietary labs are free to copy, but they have a structural cost disadvantage. my objective is that open weights models remain competitive on capability but lead on capability/cost.
Isn't the thing open source and governed by its own license?
especially in larger projects where maintainership duties are heavily delegated, the last thing i want is some tool that can only be used by me, because suddenly i can no longer share the workload that tool targets with people who aren't "technically" maintainers.
I'm sure they train their models on open source software, so how do I know that LLM generated code doesn't reproduce substantial chunks of, for example, GPL licensed code? If indeed there are GPL violations, what are AI companies doing to police themselves?
I wonder if open source licenses will start to include "not to be used for LLM training" clauses.
As if the LLM trainers would care. They've ignored every single license and copyright policy out there because "fair transformative use". It's undergoing litigation in various jurisdictions, and the chaotic side of me really wants to see what happens if a UK or California decide that training an LLM on pirated copyrighted material is not fair use, and the rights holders have to be compensated.
IMO this is an insult if anything
Companies a thousandth their size are giving free or at-cost access for OSS projects.
We got it yesterday, maybe they just started rolling it out and hence op posted this.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-bT5v5Tm7w&t=164s
It should be maintained by humans, relying on widely available hardware and software, requiring little of both.
Not saying that using LLMs as a convenience is forbidden or anything, but the direction is problematic.
(Also, this sounds like a cheap alternative to actually funding FOSS work.)
I mean seriously, you already ripped off all the worlds open source code. Be more generous and don't demand anything else back. Six months is so little too.
i imagine the usage from maintainers of high quality projects are excellent training data. much better than average joe
How dare they only give me this much free stuff! I want that much free stuff!
(Actually I don't, I want their stuff as Free Software and I mean everything, training data, pipelines and all)
Whenever companies do things like this, it's both, or at least trying hard to be. To the extent that it's perceived by developers (that is, potential OpenAI customers) as helping OSS, it's effective marketing. This perception may or may not correspond to reality.
I've forked tensorzero after they archived the repo and will be updating and fixing issues going forward.
https://github.com/agentify-sh/gateway
this is my 2nd attempt
I am using my idle codex usage but would benefit from more inference
If you have more than 100 stars, you can get $50 in starter credit.
Ideally organizations, more so than people, provide the bulk of future donations.
As for this program, ehh... Sceptical in general of any frontier program that ends at some time.
Once you're embedded, and all that...
Correction: only in part
Yes, Amazon is the only company named, but would anyone be surprised if OpenAI was one of the other five companies? It's hard to imagine a company that would materially benefit more from this event.
The evidence is circumstantial, of course, but can you blame people for making a connection?
[1] https://www.axios.com/2026/06/13/anthropic-amazon-white-hous...
(no internal knowledge, this is based on my experience with explainshell.com, thanks OAI!)