Eric Limer - 

Marissa Mayer and the folks at Yahoo! have a nice little gift for you this holiday season: free Pro Flickr for three months for any and all users, old and new. Surely this is just all in the spirit of holiday cheer and has nothing to do with cleverly making use of another image-sharing service’s TOS debacle, right? Right?!

Normally a Pro subscription to Flickr will run you £16 for a year, but until January 4th, you can get your start for free. Existing pro-users won’t get left out in the cold either; their next payment date will be pushed back three months automatically. How nice.

What does this mean for Flickr as a service going forward? It could mean that Yahoo! is using all that Instagram chaos to try to pick up as many cast-offs as possible and ideally get them hooked on Flickr Pro. It could also be testing the waters to see how it fares when Pro membership is free, potentially prepping a change to its fairly ancient membership format. Either way, Pro Flickr is free for the next three months, so you might as well give it a shot. There aren’t any filters, but hey, maybe that’s a feature. [Flickr via Business Insider]