I like what GitHub and Jetbrains are doing, where you get Copilot and PyCharm for free as long as you're a maintainer. They keep renewing my license.

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".

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lanyard-textile 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's a spectrum, right?

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.

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SlinkyOnStairs 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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.)

	▲	lanyard-textile 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's a very compelling argument, I see what you mean. It is an attempt to raise the budget bar for OSS -- We do not want that.

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stavros 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Eh, no, I'd like it much more if it were an ongoing offering of the $20 plan than a one-off of the $200 plan. The latter just screams of sales tactic.

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pigpop 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The 20x plan is much more useful if you use it full time. Trying to put a full 8 hour workday in on the $20 plan is painful since you have to stop when you reach your usage limit and that comes up quickly at that tier. The 20x plan is enough to have multiple independent Claude Code sessions running in parallel working on different features or bugs without hitting limits (unless you've got a lot of sessions going).

	▲	stavros 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's the problem, it's a "get hooked on the useful plan for six months and then pay us" vs "here's a little something so you can get a little help every day, but forever".

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lostmsu 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

GitHub also does it fully automatically (but they don't share explicit criteria).

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mostlyk 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

what's the Github program here?

	▲	univrsal 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Github gives Copilot Pro to open source maintainers but they don't really tell you what the requirements are. I have it and I just get a notification every month that it's been renewed and I never even applied for it. I assume it's a combination of activity on github and popularity of your repositories.
	▲	lambda 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I mean, there's also the whole GitHub free tier. It used to only be for public repos, so mostly OSS plus "shared source", but now they allow it for private as well. But it still costs them money to host your code and provide CI minutes.