Codex for open source

(openai.com)

197 points | by EvgeniyZh 2 days ago

31 comments

  • zmmmmm 6 hours ago

    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.

    • EduardoBautista 4 hours ago

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

      • HatchedLake721 4 hours ago

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

        • runlevel1 3 hours ago

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

          • wodenokoto 4 hours ago

            6 email addresses gives you 6 one months trials …

            • tclancy 3 hours ago

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

              • manquer 3 hours ago

                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.

                • maybe_pablo 1 hour ago

                  icloud+ hide my email for $0.99

                  • Groxx 3 hours ago

                    One can consult the oracle, /dev/random

                  • gruez 1 hour ago

                    Since when did they have trials?

                    • wodenokoto 53 minutes ago

                      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.

                    • Supermancho 1 hour ago

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

                    • throwitaway222 4 hours ago

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

                  • fortuitous-frog 7 hours ago

                    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).

                    • 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

                      • rmast 2 hours ago

                        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.

                      • vldszn 7 hours ago

                        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

                        • agentifysh 13 minutes ago

                          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

                          • hmokiguess 7 hours ago

                            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?

                            • arjie 7 hours ago

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

                              • gruez 1 hour ago

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

                            • ilia-a 7 hours ago

                              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.

                            • colinsane 6 hours ago

                              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.

                              • ixtli 5 hours ago

                                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.

                                • altmanaltman 17 minutes ago

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

                                  • georgemcbay 2 hours ago

                                    > 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.

                                  • drw 7 hours ago

                                    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.

                                    • mrgoldenbrown 6 hours ago

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

                                      • drw 5 hours ago

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

                                    • 28304283409234 7 hours ago

                                      6 whole months?! Gee golly thanks mister!

                                      • hnthrow10282910 7 hours ago

                                        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

                                        • nish__ 3 hours ago

                                          Especially considering they trained the damn thing on our code.

                                      • veni0 5 hours ago

                                        I applied last months ago and again, but there not have any information, but Claude is very fast. I build the https://github.com/go-vgo/robotgo, https://github.com/go-ego/gse and others, 20k+

                                        • ev3lynx727 1 hour ago

                                          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.

                                          • wseqyrku 1 hour ago

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

                                          • mkagenius 4 hours ago

                                            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.

                                            • holografix 1 hour ago

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

                                              • upghost 7 hours ago

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

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

                                                • jasonjmcghee 6 hours ago

                                                  They’ve been doing this since at least March

                                                  • 3836293648 5 hours ago

                                                    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.

                                                    • goodroot 4 hours ago

                                                      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!

                                                  • fuddle 27 minutes ago

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

                                                    • 2001zhaozhao 8 hours ago

                                                      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.

                                                      • htrp 1 hour ago

                                                        Anyone know how much API credit openai offers?

                                                        • monster_truck 8 hours ago

                                                          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.

                                                        • winfredJa 8 hours ago

                                                          my guess is they get high quality training data.

                                                          • measurablefunc 8 hours ago

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

                                                          • vinhnx 6 hours ago

                                                            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.

                                                            • vintagedave 1 day ago

                                                              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.

                                                              • tuananh 4 hours ago

                                                                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

                                                                • purpleidea 2 hours ago

                                                                  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.

                                                                  • goodroot 4 hours ago

                                                                    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...

                                                                    • sscaryterry 8 hours ago

                                                                      Hurdles, more hurdles.

                                                                      • outime 6 hours ago

                                                                        Codex for open source stored in GitHub*

                                                                        • dottchen 5 hours ago

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

                                                                          • realo 7 hours ago

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

                                                                            • OutOfHere 7 hours ago

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

                                                                              Correction: only in part

                                                                              • wyrdcurt 6 hours ago

                                                                                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...

                                                                            • dartharva 1 hour ago

                                                                              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.

                                                                              • ReptileMan 8 hours ago

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

                                                                                • SweetSoftPillow 8 hours ago

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