Codex for open source

by EvgeniyZh • 1 month ago

275 118 1 month 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.

monster_truck• 1 month 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.

vinhnx2• 1 month ago

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

cute_boi• 1 month ago

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

sscaryterry• 1 month ago

Hurdles, more hurdles.

2001zhaozhao• 1 month 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.

winfredJa• 1 month ago

my guess is they get high quality training data.

measurablefunc• 1 month ago

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

ReptileMan• 1 month ago

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

SweetSoftPillow• 1 month ago

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

ilia-a2• 1 month 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.

MeetingsBrowser• 1 month ago

What project did you apply for?

ilia-a2• 1 month ago

PHP

spooneybarger• 1 month ago

Same. But I got one from Anthropic.

realo• 1 month ago

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

OutOfHere• 1 month ago

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

Correction: only in part

wyrdcurt• 1 month 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...

drw2• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

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

drw2• 1 month ago

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

fortuitous-frog• 1 month 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).

rmast• 1 month 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.

matheusmoreira3• 1 month ago

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.

mickael-kerjean• 1 month ago

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

overfeed2• 1 month ago

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"

ternaus• 1 month ago

Same here, 15k stars, 150M downloads and never heard back.

hmokiguess• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

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

gruez2• 1 month ago

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

28304283409234• 1 month ago

6 whole months?! Gee golly thanks mister!

hnthrow10282910• 1 month 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__• 1 month ago

Especially considering they trained the damn thing on our code.

baq2• 1 month ago

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

LtWorf• 1 month ago

The bank mails me a new one automatically.

vldszn• 1 month 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

upghost• 1 month ago

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

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

jasonjmcghee• 1 month ago

They’ve been doing this since at least March

3836293648• 1 month 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.

goodroot2• 1 month 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!

zmmmmm• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

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

throwitaway222• 1 month ago

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

wodenokoto2• 1 month ago

6 email addresses gives you 6 one months trials …

HatchedLake721• 1 month ago

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

runlevel1• 1 month ago

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

zzyxy• 1 month ago

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.

olzhasar• 1 month ago

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.

mqus• 1 month ago

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...

cush• 1 month ago

No good deed goes unpunished

jiggawatts• 1 month ago

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

colinsane• 1 month 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.

outime• 1 month ago

Codex for open source stored in GitHub*

vinhnx2• 1 month 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.

dottchen• 1 month ago

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

veni0• 1 month 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+

ixtli• 1 month 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.

georgemcbay• 1 month 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.

KetoManx64• 1 month ago

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

altmanaltman• 1 month ago

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

mkagenius• 1 month 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.

tuananh• 1 month 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

goodroot2• 1 month 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...

purpleidea• 1 month 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.

htrp• 1 month ago

Anyone know how much API credit openai offers?

idank• 1 month ago

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!)

ev3lynx727• 1 month 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 month ago

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

akoboldfrying2• 1 month ago

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.

holografix• 1 month ago

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

dartharva• 1 month 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.

ameon• 1 month ago

what they do when someone switches from open source to closed source later

fuddle• 1 month ago

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

baq2• 1 month ago

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

agentifysh• 1 month 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

seu• 1 month ago

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

kelnos• 1 month ago

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.

petesergeant• 1 month ago

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

ACCount37• 1 month ago

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".

dominotw• 1 month ago

is there any company or product that donates their subscription service free forever ?

Gee101• 1 month ago

Github?

prodigycorp• 1 month ago

I read anthropic's offer is majorly nerfed compared to their regular 20x plan. I've seen OSS develoeprs ask anthropic to revert their plan to a paid plan because it's otherwise a hindrance.

einpoklum• 1 month ago

"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.)

jeena• 1 month ago

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

akoboldfrying2• 1 month ago

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!

ahartmetz• 1 month ago

I want my license fee from my software that they trained their models on.

(Actually I don't, I want their stuff as Free Software and I mean everything, training data, pipelines and all)

emsign• 1 month ago

They are coming for the repositories now.

TZubiri• 1 month ago

What a visionary Stallman was.

breve• 1 month ago

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.

sofixa• 1 month ago

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.

metalspot3• 1 month ago

I wouldn't use anything but open weights models for developing open source software. This is just training OpenAI and Anthropic to steal your work for their proprietary models.

_the_inflator• 1 month ago

The crux of open source: per definition it is opened for the public to use it.

I see it as a chance. Many OS projects themselves offer LLM readable websites, their docs.

This way the project at least not only gets ingested but receives referential treatment.

Some sort of collaboration. Ingested it will be, anyway.

metalspot3• 1 month ago

I see it as a chance

absolutely. AI is the same as any other software, and open source has to integrate, adapt, and lead to make sure that open source values continue to propagate.

my personal approach is to focus on developing with open weights models, so that my work is optimized for them, and leads to their development. proprietary labs are free to copy, but they have a structural cost disadvantage. my objective is that open weights models remain competitive on capability but lead on capability/cost.

maccard• 1 month ago

If your license is open then Anthropic and OpenAI are using your work anyway.

metalspot3• 1 month ago

the user prompts and harness used for development are much more valuable for training than the final source code.

my approach to open source development with AI now is to include all of the agent sessions used in development in the repository, which makes this data freely available for training for both proprietary and open weights models, but that is just my own approach. every open source developer ultimately has to make their own judgement on the best way to integrate AI in accordance with their values.

medmarrouchi• 1 month ago

Applied twice and didn't get any response

ramon156• 1 month ago

First hit's free

julianlam• 1 month ago

6 months is a joke.

Companies a thousandth their size are giving free or at-cost access for OSS projects.

bibryam• 1 month ago

A few AI companies giving free stuff to OSS maintainers - Dosu - CodeRabbit - OpenAI - Anthropic

https://www.oss.fund/explore/?pillar=operational-support&cat...

Codex for open source

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