You need to apply once a year and you need to be a maintainer of an active oss project for the oss license. From my experience they're very lenient in regards to what they consider active, but I don't think I'd jump trough the hoops if I didn't start using Rider with the student license.

Free for non-commercial offers a easy way to get people to use it and hopefully advocate for it at their jobs.

It was still a process. You had to have an established OSS project and go through the partnership process.

Now you can just use it for free for any hobby/oss projects without all the red tape.