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 the two concerns I have are, what happens when someone uses it to make the projects I work on again but with one design change, and it this pulling up the ladder behind us? Will someone still be able to start a project five years from now and do what you’ve done? Or come into existing projects like I have?
This is the thing I hate most about AI. It is a huge shift in power towards big companies that have the capital to throw at it. And towards those few mega corporations that control the tech.
It's a big shift away from hobbyists, tinkerers and people exploring ideas on their own time.
I dont know what the future will look like, but IMO open source is the intersection of code and community (aka the squishy bits) and for that reason I dont think AI will make it obselete, not now nor in the future.
- Unlimited browserstack. This would cost thousands of dollars
- Free netlify hosting. Server side analytics is still $9/m, but anyway
These plans have one thing in common: they are not limited in time. Open source cannot be built on an unstable foundation.
The six-month anthropic offer is just ridiculous. Bland PR move, I can’t express how miserable this plan is. It just not for us
Agreed that $200 USD would be preferable (credits dont pay rent). My comment is directed at the strong words others have left about this being in bad faith on the whole. Even if it is, then their bad faith efforts are better than most.
Opinions here will vary, I wanted to share mine <3
To OPs point, whether you want to call it a gift kinda feels like splitting hairs. As is well established, most software companies have huge dependencies on OSS yet contribute very little so $1200 in free service is a pretty big step up over the fuck-all you'll get from most places.
Also, the end product is open source anyway, so there is no case of IP being leaked into training data. What remains is that they can use, with your permission, the overall coding practices of a great programmer to fine-tune Claude's code and models. As in, how one approaches planning or troubleshooting. Is this a bad thing? Perhaps every maintainer should decide for themselves whether they want to contribute back or not.
I think what you’re getting at involves more data that was scraped illegally. Like if Anthropic gave free Claude access to writers since it just lost a lawsuit related to copyrighted books, that would be kind of a slap in the face. But OSS software is not published with an expectation of payment.
Don't get me wrong, I definitely see the cynical side that Claude may potentially benefit from learning my high quality coding practices as a result of this... This is clearly also a way to source high quality training data. Maintainers of open source projects with 5K+ stars are among the most competent engineers you can find and they're not biased towards unnecessary complexity as most corporate folks are. The reason is simple; if you code for free, there is no incentive to maximize billable hours; it's the opposite. This is a real gold-mine of quality coding data. AI companies should be fighting over us.
But still, I think this is nice in either case. These days, I appreciate people using even cold calculated logic as a motivation for doing the right thing. I'm tired of people being irrational and doing the wrong thing because the wrong thing sounds more marketable to investors.
In fact, Anthropic should go further and let open source developers invest in them before their IPO. I've been trying to do that for a while but they haven't let me :'(
Thank you!
> In 2025 I made $10 from open source
Slightly off-topic, but I wish more OSS projects and maintainers would advertise cryptocurrency donation addresses. It's probably the easiest way for end users to donate.
I still get random donations through an old PayPal email address that's listed on the same page as my bitcoin address, and that totals more like $100 (a year, not over the lifetime).
ANTHROPIC IS GIVING EVERY DECENTLY LARGE MAINTAINER $1000 WORTH OF INFERENCE (~x8 that in API prices)
They likely made a marketing budget for this of $1M or so
Other OSS stuff like Copilot or JetBrains costs to providers much less, $100/yr most (licenses are not expenses, only inference is)
Anthropic may get $500(average total for all 6mo) per user of just inference costs
6 months is because this is experimental and they have no idea what to expect
(their devrel department is meh as you could've noticed already), when they see it working they'll make it autorenew or something
ESR (Eric S.Raymond) asked OpenAI to match and got one, so the same offer from OpenAI will likely follow soon[tm]
The first PR is unlikely to be merged the next day; however, it sparks lots of productive discussions with the rest of the community, allowing your kid to build a mental model of the project's best practices and sensitivities.
The more he contributes, the more integral he becomes to the community. After gaining enough experience through small issues, they can even consider working on a new feature.
As a byproduct, a great addition to the CV if they are also looking to go commercial.
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)."
If I'm reading it wrong, let me know.
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.
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.
In comparison, a program that grants time-limited credits to a few high-visibility projects reads like a self-serving marketing move no matter how you slice it.
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?
Instead of potentially getting billed for some trial I forgot about, I would rather pay for a month, immediately cancel, and then repeat every month when I realize it's not working.
Besides helping me keep my expenses under control, it doubles as an evaluation of the company. If they make it difficult to cancel, or do not let me use the rest of my paid time, I know they are not a company I want to do business with.
OSS maintainer: I'd like to cancel my subscription!
Claude: Thank you for prolonging your subscription for another year. I'll take the required steps.
OSS maintainer: No, I said CANCEL!
Claude: You are absolutely right! Thank you for your two year subscription.This feels especially ugly to me because maintainers of large open source projects will feel pressure to keep using tools that let them work in an AI-assisted world. This really feels like it will make life harder for open source maintainers in the end, rather than easier. That's the opposite of what a meaningful open source campaign should look like.
At the very least, it puts maintainers right back in the position of having to beg giant companies for handouts.
Your suggestion of "we'll evaluate" individually would be a very costly undertaking for Anthropic. Not reasonable. If your suggestion was for Anthropic to evaluate at the end of the 6 months whether to continue the free plan generally, I don't see anything that prevents them from doing so.
I think Anthropic should probably give some notice in the CLI or Claude.ai in the final month of the offer. Not doing that would be a bit ugly.
Would it? The only way to access Claude is via a CLI or a GUI.
> $ claude --resume
> No subscription active (expired on 6/1/2026). Reactivate at claude.ai/settings.
No. "Sorry, subscription has expired, please re-up your account" is an extremely reasonable UX.
The whole "free period but we'll auto bill you after" is a shitty dark pattern that mostly exists to extract value from life admin errors. The people who got enough value to justify the cost would've paid anyway.
What is ugly here is the combination of the free trial (not ugly in an of itself), and they way they are trying to recruit qualified users for it from open source.
Why? The resulting code generated by Claude is unfit for training, so any work product produced after the start of the subsidized program should be ignored.
Therefore it makes sense to charge them for the service after 6 months, no? Heh.
You need to be careful of the amount of reinforcement learning vs continued pretraining you do, but they already do plenty of other forms of reinforcement learning, I'm sure they have it dialed in.
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".
It would be showing greater higher quality appreciation to offer an ongoing benefit.
But there is some benefit to giving maintainers a generous trial length with your offering. 6 months is certainly long enough to see how well it does or does not incorporate into your project.
It just so happens we almost all universally love the offering.
This would be fine in the context of a general sales pitch/marketing deal.
But OSS development and maintenance is special here. It has a budget of $0. As a sales strategy, Anthropic would be better off trying to sell luxury gold plated bindles to hobos.
And there's another question: How exactly does Anthropic see the future of OSS, with this pitch? What are they thinking? Is this the new norm for OSS a $200/month entry fee?
Because adding such a cost to OSS would not only go against everything OSS stands for, and would push the vast majority of maintainers into quitting their projects.
(Now, Anthropic can't mandate maintainers use Claude, though a much-discussed side effect of tools like Claude has been the increased burden on OSS maintainers. And while Anthropic does not raise suggestion that they deal with this by employing AI tools, bystanders most certainly have.)
Giving me Max 20x for 6 months would just get me hooked more on it to the point that I'd likely upgrade my subscription after the free period is over. Or I'd just go back to Pro and feel shittier about it.
If they were giving it away for free indefinitely, then that would actually be generous and altruistic. I don't think it's a spectrum; I think nothing free is one thing, some defined period of free is a sales tactic, and free indefinitely/forever is actual generosity.
But hey, I applied anyway; we'll see.
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?
> Don't quite fit the criteria If you maintain something the ecosystem quietly depends on, apply anyway and tell us about it.
And yes I hate it. Some "scanners" flag all my projects as abandoned because I moved to codeberg.
First we couldn't use our Claude subscription with anything but Claude code, then the limits seemed to change every week without any communication, then they banned a bunch of people (including some prominent names). Then they complain about the Chinese distilling using their API (which I'm partly sympathetic to but let's not pretend that Antrophic invented their training data from scratch).
Then there's this half-baked offer. I mean sure, it looks nice on paper but given how incredibly valuable opensource has been for them and given their budget it does seem a bit tight.
Charitably this will be great for open source software so... so long as they never moat up and lockdown.
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.
NPM probably adds a lot. I can't find any recent sources, but NPM packages get downloaded a lot (e.g., every Github Action run.) And to get such a download, an NPM package just has to be somewhere in the dependency tree, which are famously enormous. (Though many might not be updated in the past 3 months, though.)
[0] https://github.com/search?q=stars%3A%3E5000+sort%3Astars&typ...
I love these questions bc they both can be answered with some slight heuristics, and they are quite surprising!
As of January 2026, there were > 13k npm packages w/ more than 1 Million monthly downloads [1]
Answering "how many total developers does that cover" is a lot harder (more expensive, rather, as I am not going to pay for the query on Google BigQuery to answer it, not after I spent $3k by accident last time doing similar exploration in the past)
I wont try to make a SWAG about how many devs have write access across those repos, but in the npm ecosystem alone I'm comfortable saying it is an order of magnitude more than 100.
[1] - https://gist.github.com/jonchurch/1dd845f4d26823fce5590af1aa...
I guess I will just have to NOT sign on to this nonsense and allow it to atrophy my ability to think of things independently, thus ending up completely dependent on an outside tool of ever-increasing price.
Gosh darn it, of all the luck.
This is going to get abused so fast, it will make your head spin.
EDIT: I just look up the highest-ranking "buy GitHub stars" page (which I will obviously not link here), and it looks like you would have to pay a little over $1000 to get the required amount of stars. So I suppose it might not get abused as easily as I thought.
On the other hand, someone with the gumption and elbow grease to abuse this process themselves could still easily do so, I'd wager.
All that being said, I still think that GitHub stars are effectively worthless, and attempting to assign value to them like this is, at best, a fool's errand.
I can imagine this will invoke Goodhart's law, increasing the amount of people shilling their AI-generated shovelware onto a Web already greatly suffering from the consequences of the plummeting cost of intelligent-sounding text generation.
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 was tempted about applying but that part is everything but nice and I think I'll just pass
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.
All the big LLM labs do promos constantly. Sure, this one's on the stingy side considering the amount of work OSS maintainers just give out, but there's nothing wrong with promotions.
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.
And then Anthropic (and others) comes along, files off the name, and repackages that gift to sell to someone else for money. That’s not respectful.
even if you've got an outstanding project, now everyone has to wade through no much noise it'll never be found
Maybe get out of your SVG bubble and realize that people don't like companies that rat fuck the commons for a quick buck. It's disgusting.
There should be a penny tax per prompt that funds open source development through grants.
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.
That said, they do have a "contact us" line in there which implies some flexibility.
And completely excludes projects not hosted on Microsoft's GitHub or NPM (Though they do say you can contact them if you don't meet their insane criteria).
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.
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
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.
Believe it or not, there are still a large amount of great tech professionals out there who are sceptical about AI. Many tried AI a year ago and has the impression that "It was alright but had limitations". AI came a long way since then, and it is going to improve even faster over the next 6 months. So this is Anthropics invite for you to join that journey.
In turn, of course this fuels the adoption by superstars (maintainers) endorsing the models.
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).
Sincerely,
Sales & Marketing
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.
It's so weird to think that you can build a webpage where you do something so incredibly "fancy" that one (sadly now minority) fully-featured web browser can't display a simple web form.
In the past week (besides the constant slop), there are models which have misattributed the copyright of new files to me, and stripped my copyright from existing files. It's sapping up time, energy and motivation.
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
Right, because Node is the only package ecosystem.
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.
–Ackbar, open source software maintainer
Laughable.
This is a tiny, if even unimportant, fraction of the FOSS community that runs the modern tech stack.
There's nothing wrong with taking advantage of limited offers.
In any case, the fine print says that participants have to purchase after the expiration of the free period in order to to continue. Nothing is mentioned about having to give payment info upfront, such that the account automatically transitions to payment.
Participants who are already paying customers will have their payments suspended for that period, so I think for them it will automatically lapse back to paid, at least if their payment method is up-to-date.
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