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Posted by zhisme 15 hours ago

Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers(claude.com)
368 points | 174 commentspage 2
notatallshaw 9 hours ago|
AI is somewhat helpful but I'm not interested in a company finding a way for me to pay to do my volunteer OSS work. GitHub Copilot offers a permanent free subscription for OSS maintainers.

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.

arjie 4 hours ago||
Made a mistake reading this thread on Safari where I don't have the usual suspects blocked. Some guy read that this converts to paid and then a bunch of people just kept repeating it. A real lesson in how many people are simply repeating things without knowing anything.
dizhn 3 hours ago||
One guy had a misunderstanding and it was corrected. The rest is saying that it's like a time limited trial at the end of which they are hoping to have you as a paid customer, which seems accurate.
giobox 3 hours ago|||
Right? People worry about the amount of LLM slop comments appearing on hn, we humans often do an even better job of writing nonsense. Would be fascinating to see what percentage of hn users only ever read the post title and never the contents of the link.
elxr 2 hours ago||
How do you block on HN?
arjie 2 hours ago||
I have a Chrome extension here https://overmod.org/ with some lists of likes/dislikes. But these days you can trivially reimplement it yourself without the server and just using Chrome sync (or use the extension, it has local sync as well). If you want, point Claude Code at this repo of mine https://github.com/TechnologyBrotherhood/overmod-extension and it can pretty quickly write you a copy (it doesn't actually need the reference, but it might help skip some questions).
elxr 1 hour ago||
Thanks, this'll be very useful.
xantronix 8 hours ago||
Open source developers should be paid for their efforts, and for their contributions to LLM models, past, present, and future, rather than be enticed into paying to participate six months down the road.
lasgawe 7 hours ago||
I agree with your points btw
zhisme 7 hours ago||
OSS developers driven by something else than just money I believe. They are proud of their work of giving something to the community with their name on it. So such respect as giving free subscription to them I think matters, as they were mentioned and respected.
latexr 5 hours ago|||
> They are proud of their work of giving something to the community with their name on it.

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.

blibble 6 hours ago||||
the pride aspect is gone though

even if you've got an outstanding project, now everyone has to wade through no much noise it'll never be found

zhisme 3 hours ago||||
no, I'm not against them to be paid by Anthropic too. But this symbolic action is also cool and respectful imo
shimman 5 hours ago|||
Nah, I know open source devs that would rather tax these companies into paying actual open source devs.

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.

sigmar 10 hours ago||
>Maintainers: You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads. You've made commits, releases, or PR reviews within the last 3 months.

pour one out for us gitlab users :(

bee_rider 9 hours ago|
Other comments indicate that it’s just a free trial that converts to paid at the end. So, don’t worry, you are just excluded from an ad basically.
lkbm 7 hours ago|||
I wish more ads offered me $1200 of usage followed by the option to either pay to keep using the product or just stop at no cost.
Mattwmaster58 8 hours ago|||
It converts back to paid automatically if you had an existing paid subscription before. No other cases. In any case, this is still a valuable service they are providing for 6mo for free, which many will appreciate even if the goal is to recruit more users.
koinedad 6 hours ago||
Sorry 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.
hadlock 3 hours ago||
If richard stallman were dead (he's not), he'd be rolling over in his grave right now
guntars 5 hours ago||
People on a tech forum making "copying is theft" arguments lol
epiccoleman 5 hours ago|||
on open-source licensed code, no less
chroma_zone 2 hours ago||
The terms of those licenses are still relevant...
amatecha 5 hours ago|||
I mean that's what's been shoved in our faces for decades, every time we load any piece of software or play any video game
mohsen1 8 hours ago||
I get Copilot for free as an open source maintainer and it's nice. But right now I am also paying for two Claude Max ($200/mo) for my own projects. Would be nice to have one of them covered for at least 6 months! Hope Anthropic accepts my application because I do not track downloads at all.
OskarS 10 hours ago||
For 6 months? So it's just a fancy, "first one is free" trial?
stavros 9 hours ago|
Yep, looks like it. Plus they only count NPM downloads, because apparently no other language matters.
nDRDY 9 hours ago|||
Looks like the most-popular NPM packages are about to get even harder to maintain.
zmmmmm 3 hours ago|||
leftpad developer finally receives due recognition!
Robdel12 8 hours ago||
I really appreciate the gesture, but this kind of feels like it’s an attempt to claw (lol) some good will back from devs. The barrier is way too high, imo. And the 6 month cap does make sense given the cost of LLMs but it’s a bad feeling. We like you, but for 6 months.

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)

nitinreddy88 10 hours ago||
Essentially they want you to use it for 6 months and then hook you up to their paid offerings. Smart
sega_sai 9 hours ago|
5000 stars. That's an interesting threshold. I've checked and astropy -- the main python module used by pretty much every python user in astrophysics has 5100 stars. I would guess almost no open source code in science would pass the threshold.

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.

andersmurphy 7 hours ago||
On the bright side it means mostly JS/TS libraries will get slopified (as they tend to have the most stars thanks to ecosystem size). Small mercies.
isodev 9 hours ago|||
Number of stars also excludes self hosted forges. Stars is more of a GitHub-wants-to-be-a-social thing than actual measure of popularity.
cmrdporcupine 9 hours ago||
Yeah, I was going to come here to say this. Apart from a) stars are a dubious metric b) 5000 stars is an insanely high bar, there is the issue that there are definitely lots of projects that choose not to partake in GitHub at this point.

That said, they do have a "contact us" line in there which implies some flexibility.

ryandrake 9 hours ago|||
You can easily buy stars in bulk, like you can buy social media “likes” so they are kind of measuring the wrong thing and incentivizing the wrong behaviors.
jefftk 8 hours ago|||
It also strongly favors older projects, since stars don't expire and they've had longer to accumulate them.
limagnolia 6 hours ago||
I don't even star the vast majority of packages I use... I usually only star repos I don't use but find interesting and may want to refer back to in the future.

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).

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