[jonchurch_]

Folks 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.

[hinkley]

I might sign up just to stay on top of a market change that I don’t have an employer paying me to learn.

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?

[davidw]

> I might sign up just to stay on top of a market change that I don’t have an employer paying me to learn.

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.

[jonchurch_]

I dont want to misrepresent, I am not the original author of any of these projects. I am not JDD of lodash (who is still involved and part of the TC) nor TJ Holowaychuk of express.

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.

[zero_bias]

I’m author of relatively popular open source project (4.8k stars, 100k+ downloads/months), lived on donations for five years. I use and am eternally grateful for the following oss plans:

- 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

[slim]

it's not just a pr move. they want you to train their model. and their estimation is 6 months of data is enough.

[overgard]

I dunno, is a free trial really a gift? Especially if the thing they're trialing is built off the data you're giving them? To be fair it does have a pretty significant monetary value (which can't be transferred..), but personally it feels a little off

[jonchurch_]

I currently pay them $200/month out of my own pocket for this already, so for me it is not a free trial but subsizing my usage.

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

[remus]

> I dunno, is a free trial really a gift?

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.

[cagz]

The use of data for model training is a simple toggle, very easy to opt out of during the initial setup.

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.

[janalsncm]

It is a gift of six months of the service. And I don’t think being built using OSS matters here? For example, if AWS gave Linux maintainers free EC2 instances it wouldn’t feel off.

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.

[socketcluster]

Yep, I had the same reaction. It was like. "Huh? What? Actual acknowledgement of contributions? Cannot compute." They even made the requirements just low enough for me to qualify. We'll see if I actually get the deal though but this could be the most generous thing that ever happened to me in the open source sphere. I have a tendency to fall through every possible crack so this is an actual shock to me.

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.

[rurban]

I don't know of any good backbone service or library with 5K+ stars, only npm or python hyped bozos. There is certainly not any competence in github stars. Aren't any GNU libs maintained on GitHub? No, they are mostly not. Just very few.

[jart]

I don't think it's a slap in the face. The slap in the face is devoting your life savings to giving away your work for free and then have it sold back to you. It's really smart what Anthropic is doing. They're encouraging the most influential developers to use their product. If you take the Anthropic money then you probably won't be able to join a class action lawsuit against them. That's fine by me since I'd rather get $200/month back from Anthropic than a $200 cheque in the mail from some lawyers who got rich claiming to represent FOSS developers. Microsoft used to let open source developers use LLMs for free via Copilot. However they took that privilege away a few months ago. I'm glad Anthropic is bringing it back. Even if I only use it for coding tests and experiments.

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 :'(

[timbowhite]

> I maintain Express.js and Lodash

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.

[geerlingguy]

I have done that for years, and so far have received the equivalent of $25 (through three mBTC transactions) on my Bitcoin address, and maybe $90 through whatever the token is Brave uses (BAT?).

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).

[simonbw]

Surely the easiest way is something like a PayPal/venmo link, no? I know a lot more people who use those than crypto.

[DauntingPear7]

What’s wrong with ko-fi?

[jonchurch_]

ETH address 0x60F9CC1b97C78D8E8337Ef991a34bd8D9e600420 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[LtWorf]

Why would cryptocurrency be the easiest way to donate when nobody is using it?

[sfblah]

What's the best way for a teenager to get involved in one of the projects you maintain? I've been trying to help my kid find an entry point into the industry, and I'm one of those annoying folks who relies on open source but rarely contributes.

[cagz]

Assuming they've got reasonable programming skills. They can simply find an open-source project they are passionate about. Spend time understanding the overall structure. Then pick up an issue raised by the community and prepare a fix as a pull request.

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.

[dimava]

Just to reiterate

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]

[LtWorf]

You don't get $200/month of value, you get your first dose.

[reconnecting]

LLM code is still missing legitimacy, and open source is the way to buy it for cheap.

[pseudohadamard]

Has anyone who's signed up for this actually had a response? I'm curious to see whether any of these "AI" code analysers can produce anything more than AI slop, but after signing up for a few all I've had is AI crickets.