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
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
Over the past week I started a new project in C with GTK on Linux just for fun. I wanted to see how far it could take me. I didn't expect this at all.
One week later and I've built the task manager of my wet fever dreams in pure C. The architecture is something I never, ever would have had the time to do. It would have taken years.
I also straight up learned more about event buses, plugin architecture, and memory in the past week than I had the past 5 years.
Now I've got a DevOps tool that can capture stdout and stderr on a cron sub processes even when the cron is doing nothing with it. I can stream it somewhere at will.
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.
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.
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.
I think I'm more getting at the spirit of open source/free software, which is of social reciprocity. I think it's kind of ugly to train on programmers work with the explicit goal of putting those programmers out of work. (And based on their comments, that does seem to be Anthropic's goal -- they're not of the "this will help you do your job better" camp)
