Comment by jart

I don't think it's a slap in the face. The slap in the face is devoting your life savings to giving away your work for free and then have it sold back to you. It's really smart what Anthropic is doing. They're encouraging the most influential developers to use their product. If you take the Anthropic money then you probably won't be able to join a class action lawsuit against them. That's fine by me since I'd rather get $200/month back from Anthropic than a $200 cheque in the mail from some lawyers who got rich claiming to represent FOSS developers. Microsoft used to let open source developers use LLMs for free via Copilot. However they took that privilege away a few months ago. I'm glad Anthropic is bringing it back. Even if I only use it for coding tests and experiments.

In fact, Anthropic should go further and let open source developers invest in them before their IPO. I've been trying to do that for a while but they haven't let me :'(