DigitalOcean’s Hacktoberfest is Hurting Open Source

See DigitalOcean’s Hacktoberfest is Hurting Open Source on blog.domenic.me

Hacktoberfest is an event run by DigitalOcean which encourages open source participation. Unfortunatley, providing a t-shirt encourages spammy pull requests, increasing the burden on already burdened open source contributors.

This year, the spammy pull requests got worse. What makes this particularly bad is that until recently, DigitalOcean allowed pull requests in any public open source repository to count towards the score, whether the maintainers wanted them or not.

I don’t find anything wrong with wanting to encourage open source participation, but it needs coordination. It also feeds into the whole thing where for profit companies push work onto OSS maintainers without just compensation.