Seems rather stingy - 6 months is barely longer than you will get on a free signup deal for a lot of online products anyway. Kind of worse than nothing if it causes you to adopt work patterns that aren't sustainable for the project after the offer ends.
I applied for both. Heard back from neither. Mentioned two particular projects when applying, one with 2k stars and 5M monthly downloads, and another with 2M monthly downloads.
These grant programs feel inconsistent—sometimes they genuinely help OSS, other times they look more like marketing. Hard to tell where the balance really lies.
I applied for the first time a couple of months ago and again this month, but unfortunately I haven’t heard back from them :(
I’m building EasyInvoicePDF - a free and open-source invoice generator. (900+ GitHub stars, 2k monthly users on average, 10k total invoices downloaded)
I did fill the form our a while back (it was around for a few months now) without any response. I guess must be really big OSS project for maintainer to qualify.
a huge aspect of open source is the user -> contributor -> maintainer pipeline. maybe they mean well, but in fact they're constructing a wall between those last two groups.
especially in larger projects where maintainership duties are heavily delegated, the last thing i want is some tool that can only be used by me, because suddenly i can no longer share the workload that tool targets with people who aren't "technically" maintainers.
> If you only give 6mo then this is the opposite of a commitment to open source it’s a drug dealers tactic of giving the first taste for free.
Its arguably even more self-serving than the drug dealer tactic because of the feedback loop involved (if you use it to maintain your open source project, OpenAI will surely use that new code [along with all the existing code in your project] to train future models).
So it would be like if the drug dealer gave you the first taste for free and also the drug caused you to shit out more drugs and the drug dealer harvested your shit to sell to both future you plus other people.
Agreed. Seems like it should be indefinite given they created a multi billion dollar company off the backs of these maintainers dedicating their hard earned timed for free to begin with and then trained models against their code.
No, he didn't? He predicted that third parties would donate tokens to FOSS projects, not that the labs would. One is PR that started ages ago, the other is a reasonable prediction of where the world is going.
Not quite donate tokens directly (technically and practically weird), but donation -> compute has been out for a couple months on opub.dev (disclaimer, built it). So his prediction was somewhat correct if not late!
I think programs like this are cool, the company gets to promote their product and do good at the same time. This looks like a broader program than past ones and giving out GPT5.5 could be meaningful in improving open-source projects' security.
Applied in March when it first launched for VT Code, a Rust-based terminal coding agent, but haven't heard back from OpenAI. The bar seems high, which makes sense given the fund's limited scope and requirements.
The difference between this one (good) and the Anthropic program (bad) is that openai doesn't force you into a marketing clause while Anthropic does.
I mean seriously, you already ripped off all the worlds open source code. Be more generous and don't demand anything else back. Six months is so little too.
How is this different from https://openai.com/form/codex-open-source-fund/ and are the winners listed anywhere? I've only ever seen devs say it isn't worth bothering, many of which I would've expected to be shoe ins for something like this.
I wonder how well this supports niche languages. There's an indication there for stars or other signals of importance to 'the ecosystem'; that could match the Big Libraries but likely not ones for small languages.
The Axios article[1] I read says "calls from Amazon — as well as at least five other companies to a variety of senior administration officials Thursday evening and Friday morning — led to the model being shut down by Friday night".
Yes, Amazon is the only company named, but would anyone be surprised if OpenAI was one of the other five companies? It's hard to imagine a company that would materially benefit more from this event.
The evidence is circumstantial, of course, but can you blame people for making a connection?
In my experience most SaaS apps do not filter this out and allow re-sign ups with sub-addresses.
Gmail has an additional behavior that dot character is ignored in local component of the address . [email protected], [email protected] [email protected] all route to the same inbox as well.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5233 [2] Less common in work hosted ESPs but almost universally default enabled in public ESPs for consumers.
I’m building EasyInvoicePDF - a free and open-source invoice generator. (900+ GitHub stars, 2k monthly users on average, 10k total invoices downloaded)
https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
Isn't the thing open source and governed by its own license?
especially in larger projects where maintainership duties are heavily delegated, the last thing i want is some tool that can only be used by me, because suddenly i can no longer share the workload that tool targets with people who aren't "technically" maintainers.
Its arguably even more self-serving than the drug dealer tactic because of the feedback loop involved (if you use it to maintain your open source project, OpenAI will surely use that new code [along with all the existing code in your project] to train future models).
So it would be like if the drug dealer gave you the first taste for free and also the drug caused you to shit out more drugs and the drug dealer harvested your shit to sell to both future you plus other people.
IMO this is an insult if anything
We got it yesterday, maybe they just started rolling it out and hence op posted this.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-bT5v5Tm7w&t=164s
I mean seriously, you already ripped off all the worlds open source code. Be more generous and don't demand anything else back. Six months is so little too.
i imagine the usage from maintainers of high quality projects are excellent training data. much better than average joe
If you have more than 100 stars, you can get $50 in starter credit.
Ideally organizations, more so than people, provide the bulk of future donations.
As for this program, ehh... Sceptical in general of any frontier program that ends at some time.
Once you're embedded, and all that...
Correction: only in part
Yes, Amazon is the only company named, but would anyone be surprised if OpenAI was one of the other five companies? It's hard to imagine a company that would materially benefit more from this event.
The evidence is circumstantial, of course, but can you blame people for making a connection?
[1] https://www.axios.com/2026/06/13/anthropic-amazon-white-hous...