alt.hn

6/11/2026 at 10:20:03 PM

Codex for open source

 https://openai.com/form/codex-for-oss/

by EvgeniyZh

6/14/2026 at 7:26:33 AM

Same as Anthropic's similar offer, they're only giving 6 months free. This really just feels like a way to get OSS maintainers hooked so they buy subscriptions after the free period is over.

If they were really serious about supporting OSS, they'd offer it for free perpetually (well, with periodic checks to ensure the maintainers are still affiliated with the project). Anything less just makes it look like a marketing stunt.

And also, dumb how Github-centric this is, same as Anthropic's signup form. Most of my OSS contributions aren't on Github. Guess that means the projects I've worked on don't matter.

by kelnos

6/14/2026 at 10:14:23 AM

The bulk of open source development is (still?) on Github.

It's not like the Linux kernel isn't real. It's just that the kind of people who write Linux kernel patches and get them accepted are, in the eyes of an average open source developer, somewhere between "majestic magical creatures" and "madmen".

by ACCount37

6/14/2026 at 8:04:09 AM

Presumably it's also sessions that they will absolutely use as training data?

by petesergeant

6/13/2026 at 9:21:29 PM

FYI this program is ~3 months old, and Anthropic has a similar Claude for Open Source program (see https://claude.com/contact-sales/claude-for-oss).

by fortuitous-frog

6/14/2026 at 3:46:45 AM

I applied for my oss project Filestash which satisfy all their criterias but never heard back despite the project having millions of users, more than 14000 stars on github and representing more work than a single person can cope with

by mickael-kerjean

6/14/2026 at 8:11:43 AM

I doubt considerations are based on need. Filestash is cool, but probably isn't the marquee marketing opportunity they are looking for; it jas to be a household name they can name-drop or place a logo on a marketing page and get instant street-cred "${AI_MODEL}: Used* by the React project in 95% of PRs closed last quarter"

by overfeed

6/14/2026 at 6:18:22 AM

[dead]

by huflungdung

6/14/2026 at 2:11:45 AM

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.

by rmast

6/14/2026 at 5:23:48 AM

Now I'm wondering what the bar is since even people with millions of users aren't making the cut. I'm orders of magnitude smaller but I signed up too since I had nothing to lose. Didn't get a response, of course.

by matheusmoreira

6/14/2026 at 9:38:57 AM

Is it possible this is vapour marketing and no projects are actually being selected? Perhaps someone from a project who has heard back can respond here?

by adrithmetiqa

6/14/2026 at 10:51:42 AM

What are AI companies doing to respect open source licenses and copyright?

I'm sure they train their models on open source software, so how do I know that LLM generated code doesn't reproduce substantial chunks of, for example, GPL licensed code? If indeed there are GPL violations, what are AI companies doing to police themselves?

I wonder if open source licenses will start to include "not to be used for LLM training" clauses.

by breve

6/14/2026 at 11:15:41 AM

> I wonder if open source licenses will start to include "not to be used for LLM training" clauses

As if the LLM trainers would care. They've ignored every single license and copyright policy out there because "fair transformative use". It's undergoing litigation in various jurisdictions, and the chaotic side of me really wants to see what happens if a UK or California decide that training an LLM on pirated copyrighted material is not fair use, and the rights holders have to be compensated.

by sofixa

6/13/2026 at 10:14:42 PM

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.

by zmmmmm

6/14/2026 at 12:01:40 AM

Which online product gives away 6 months of a $100 per month subscription?

by EduardoBautista

6/14/2026 at 9:43:48 AM

Jetbrains gives away for free infinity years of a $180+ per year subscription (its more expensive in the first year or for orgs)[1] for open source authors, students, and more. Sure, the per-month price tag is not as high but after year 4 you saved much more.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/store/?section=students&billing=ye...

by mqus

6/14/2026 at 9:47:10 AM

Though it doesn't cost them anything of note to provide this other than maybe some lost sales to devs who would have bought it.

by Gigachad

6/14/2026 at 12:28:34 AM

Every 2nd SaaS with a startup plan? I used intercom/customer.io/segment/amplitude/mixpanel for free for a year.

by HatchedLake721

6/14/2026 at 5:12:06 AM

The marginal cost of all of those is definitely much lower than for Codex, though

by pastel8739

6/14/2026 at 6:57:57 AM

An online product that was brought into existence by processing all the open source software in the world and makes money by selling the resulting knowledge base, should be accessible free of charge by the producers of that open source software.

by olzhasar

6/14/2026 at 6:39:29 AM

Make it $200/month subscription which actually gives you access to O($1K) worth of codex compute. Even at the face value it is very generous, IMO.

by zzyxy

6/14/2026 at 1:42:11 AM

The price might be more commoditized if OpenAI kept true to the original mission that lives on, albeit vestigially, in their name.

by runlevel1

6/14/2026 at 12:27:41 AM

6 email addresses gives you 6 one months trials …

by wodenokoto

6/14/2026 at 1:10:24 AM

Where am I going to find multiple+email@adress.es?

by tclancy

6/14/2026 at 1:52:22 AM

Using a plus sign is subaddressing [1] and most ESPs[2] will route to the main address ( multiple@addre.es) . So you can use use multiple+email@adress.es, multiple+xyz@adress.es and both will route the email to you.

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 . multiple@gmail.com, mult.iple@gmail.com mult.ip.le@gmail.com 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.

by manquer

6/14/2026 at 6:19:03 AM

This is not true (anymore?). I have a rather unfortunate exact naming collision with a family member. They use the full name without dot for the local gmail component, I use a dot between the first and last name.

Two or three mails have been misplaced in a decade.

by dhshhshsj

6/14/2026 at 6:30:06 AM

It is still the rules for Gmail (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en).

It would be feasible to change something like that without breaking security now.

Google can hardly start allowing/routing a new account for first.last@gmail.com when you were getting it for years even though your account is firstlast@gmail.com and sensitive communication like say from your bank would routed there.

by manquer

6/14/2026 at 1:13:26 AM

One can consult the oracle, /dev/random

by Groxx

6/14/2026 at 3:32:44 AM

icloud+ hide my email for $0.99

by maybe_pablo

6/14/2026 at 3:25:10 AM

Since when did they have trials?

by gruez

6/14/2026 at 4:00:19 AM

I’m running on my 3rd codex trial and have had a month of Gemini Pro. I think Claude is the only one without trials.

by wodenokoto

6/14/2026 at 2:57:47 AM

you need a non-voip phone number for codex SMS now, as well.

by Supermancho

6/14/2026 at 8:02:21 AM

This. I tried even tried signing up with my paid business line and it denied me due to VoIP.

by testfrequency

6/14/2026 at 12:10:18 AM

That's what I was thinking, but the downvoters are hunting today.

by throwitaway222

6/14/2026 at 8:04:53 AM

They're doing everything possible to drive up their MAU before their IPO.

by jiggawatts

6/14/2026 at 6:15:33 AM

No good deed goes unpunished

by cush

6/13/2026 at 9:44:46 PM

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)

https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf

by vldszn

6/13/2026 at 11:43:12 PM

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.

by ixtli

6/14/2026 at 2:52:41 AM

> 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.

by georgemcbay

6/14/2026 at 7:20:44 AM

Very vivid analogy that I'm never going to forget now.

by KetoManx64

6/14/2026 at 4:36:39 AM

drug dealers should teach MBA classes at this point - so many strategies pioneered by them get used by large tech companies

by altmanaltman

6/13/2026 at 9:26:21 PM

What does this clause here mean and why would they include it? https://developers.openai.com/codex/codex-for-oss-terms#7-su...

Isn't the thing open source and governed by its own license?

by hmokiguess

6/13/2026 at 9:30:35 PM

That is interesting. I would have thought they had that right without needing to add it to the ToS.

by arjie

6/14/2026 at 3:27:28 AM

It's better to have something in writing than to possibly have lawyers argue over it in court.

by gruez

6/13/2026 at 8:53:57 PM

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.

by ilia-a

6/13/2026 at 9:21:34 PM

Same. But I got one from Anthropic.

by spooneybarger

6/13/2026 at 9:13:57 PM

What project did you apply for?

by MeetingsBrowser

6/13/2026 at 9:21:45 PM

PHP

by ilia-a

6/13/2026 at 9:26:34 PM

[flagged]

by jstummbillig

6/14/2026 at 12:45:57 AM

If you harass the right person on Twitter, you could probably get that ball rolling a little faster.

by arcanemachiner

6/13/2026 at 10:26:02 PM

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.

by colinsane

6/13/2026 at 9:37:41 PM

6 whole months?! Gee golly thanks mister!

by 28304283409234

6/13/2026 at 9:51:42 PM

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.

IMO this is an insult if anything

by hnthrow10282910

6/14/2026 at 1:48:13 AM

Especially considering they trained the damn thing on our code.

by nish__

6/14/2026 at 7:31:48 AM

Do you complain to the bank that credit cards have expiration dates or to the government that passports also do?

by baq

6/14/2026 at 8:05:25 AM

The bank mails me a new one automatically.

by LtWorf

6/14/2026 at 10:49:50 AM

What a visionary Stallman was.

by TZubiri

6/13/2026 at 8:56:54 PM

Mycli (https://github.com/dbcli/mycli) is a happy recipient of sponsorship from this program. OpenAI asked for nothing in return; not even a link.

by drw

6/13/2026 at 10:50:50 PM

Are you saying they aren't getting training data from you?

by mrgoldenbrown

6/13/2026 at 11:51:37 PM

I'm sure they are getting training data! But it is hands-off otherwise.

by drw

6/13/2026 at 9:36:51 PM

[flagged]

by tclancy

6/14/2026 at 7:20:31 AM

Of course the solution to overusing AI is... to use more AI. Love it.

by seu

6/13/2026 at 8:35:23 PM

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.

by 2001zhaozhao

6/14/2026 at 12:07:38 AM

6 months a bummer, but we got it for apple sandbox - coderunner (https://github.com/instavm/coderunner)

We got it yesterday, maybe they just started rolling it out and hence op posted this.

by mkagenius

6/13/2026 at 9:45:01 PM

theprimagen called this[1] like three days ago. That was fast.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-bT5v5Tm7w&t=164s

by upghost

6/13/2026 at 11:31:59 PM

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.

by 3836293648

6/14/2026 at 12:53:08 AM

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!

by goodroot

6/13/2026 at 9:55:24 PM

They’ve been doing this since at least March

by jasonjmcghee

6/14/2026 at 8:16:16 AM

I like that a project only qualifies if it's hosted on GitHub.

by jeena

6/12/2026 at 12:02:48 PM

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.

by vintagedave

6/13/2026 at 8:18:58 PM

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.

by monster_truck

6/13/2026 at 11:15:54 PM

The former has been refreshed and rebranded. The new form URL is https://openai.com/form/codex-for-oss/

by vinhnx

6/14/2026 at 1:13:47 AM

and both of them generally don't work unless you have bought many github stars

by cute_boi

6/13/2026 at 8:44:30 PM

my guess is they get high quality training data.

by winfredJa

6/13/2026 at 8:51:57 PM

This is correct. The most valuable form of data for any AI company is corrective feedback from real use cases.

by measurablefunc

6/14/2026 at 2:40:40 AM

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.

by purpleidea

6/13/2026 at 10:53:08 PM

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.

by vinhnx

6/14/2026 at 9:45:14 AM

They are coming for the repositories now.

by emsign

6/14/2026 at 12:34:21 AM

a very good way of collecting high quality training data.

i imagine the usage from maintainers of high quality projects are excellent training data. much better than average joe

by tuananh

6/14/2026 at 3:22:59 AM

Nice way of guaranteeing access to source code as training material and intelligence gathering

by holografix

6/14/2026 at 9:32:59 AM

The amount of gift-horse-mouth-looking in this thread is amazing to me.

How dare they only give me this much free stuff! I want that much free stuff!

by akoboldfrying

6/14/2026 at 7:38:34 AM

"Critical open source software" should not, and maybe cannot, be maintained with its development requiring huge commercial-corporate infrastructure in the form of OpenAI's LLMs.

It should be maintained by humans, relying on widely available hardware and software, requiring little of both.

Not saying that using LLMs as a convenience is forbidden or anything, but the direction is problematic.

(Also, this sounds like a cheap alternative to actually funding FOSS work.)

by einpoklum

6/14/2026 at 3:21:34 AM

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.

by ev3lynx727

6/14/2026 at 3:27:18 AM

When in doubt, go with marketing. There are things that are 'just marketing' you wouldn't believe.

by wseqyrku

6/14/2026 at 9:29:21 AM

> sometimes they genuinely help OSS, other times they look more like marketing

Whenever companies do things like this, it's both, or at least trying hard to be. To the extent that it's perceived by developers (that is, potential OpenAI customers) as helping OSS, it's effective marketing. This perception may or may not correspond to reality.

by akoboldfrying

6/14/2026 at 4:40:07 AM

just applied

I've forked tensorzero after they archived the repo and will be updating and fixing issues going forward.

https://github.com/agentify-sh/gateway

this is my 2nd attempt

I am using my idle codex usage but would benefit from more inference

by agentifysh

6/14/2026 at 4:26:38 AM

"6 months of ChatGPT Pro, which includes Codex" - come on, just make it free. Last time I checked OpenAI was worth $852 billion.

by fuddle

6/14/2026 at 7:35:45 AM

This valuation is derived from the fact the three tokens aren’t free

by baq

6/13/2026 at 8:26:46 PM

Hurdles, more hurdles.

by sscaryterry

6/13/2026 at 10:31:29 PM

Codex for open source stored in GitHub*

by outime

6/13/2026 at 11:22:19 PM

it's hard to trust them when there is little human support behind the scenes

by dottchen

6/14/2026 at 12:46:26 AM

Trying to get https://opub.dev off the ground to solve this in a more open way.

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...

by goodroot

6/13/2026 at 8:56:39 PM

After what just happened to Anthropic, no way in hell will I ever use, support or give money to Kushner's OpenAI.

by realo

6/13/2026 at 9:18:05 PM

That was Amazon's doing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48519092

Correction: only in part

by OutOfHere

6/13/2026 at 10:05:12 PM

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?

[1] https://www.axios.com/2026/06/13/anthropic-amazon-white-hous...

by wyrdcurt

6/14/2026 at 3:01:18 AM

Anyone know how much API credit openai offers?

by htrp

6/14/2026 at 6:30:33 AM

They give out the subscription by default, and if they find your use case interesting enough they'll give you credits. Not sure if there's an upper limit, but I would be surprised if it's more than a few hundred dollars a month.

(no internal knowledge, this is based on my experience with explainshell.com, thanks OAI!)

by idank

6/14/2026 at 3:33:23 AM

On a side note, am I the only one who feels Codex models have a higher general first-pass success rate than Claude models on coding what you want? I use Github Copilot and always find myself drifting more towards them when working.

by dartharva

6/14/2026 at 10:33:19 AM

[flagged]

by ashish296

6/13/2026 at 11:48:47 PM

[flagged]

by verdyshd

6/14/2026 at 3:37:26 AM

[dead]

by ameon

6/13/2026 at 8:46:54 PM

The moment a corporation starts to endorse open source is the moment they admit they know that are behind.

by ReptileMan

6/13/2026 at 8:51:31 PM

Anthropic published essentially the same offering recently. By your logic, does that mean they're behind too?

by SweetSoftPillow