I dunno, is a free trial really a gift? Especially if the thing they're trialing is built off the data you're giving them? To be fair it does have a pretty significant monetary value (which can't be transferred..), but personally it feels a little off
I currently pay them $200/month out of my own pocket for this already, so for me it is not a free trial but subsizing my usage.
Agreed that $200 USD would be preferable (credits dont pay rent). My comment is directed at the strong words others have left about this being in bad faith on the whole. Even if it is, then their bad faith efforts are better than most.
Opinions here will vary, I wanted to share mine <3
> I dunno, is a free trial really a gift?
To OPs point, whether you want to call it a gift kinda feels like splitting hairs. As is well established, most software companies have huge dependencies on OSS yet contribute very little so $1200 in free service is a pretty big step up over the fuck-all you'll get from most places.
It is a gift of six months of the service. And I don’t think being built using OSS matters here? For example, if AWS gave Linux maintainers free EC2 instances it wouldn’t feel off.
I think what you’re getting at involves more data that was scraped illegally. Like if Anthropic gave free Claude access to writers since it just lost a lawsuit related to copyrighted books, that would be kind of a slap in the face. But OSS software is not published with an expectation of payment.
Is it a trial if they don’t turn it off?