Comment by kbenson
5 years ago
What can we do?
My most fervent hope is that DigitalOcean will see the harm they are doing to the open source community, and put an end to Hacktoberfest. I hope they can do it as soon as possible, before October becomes another lowpoint in the hell-year that is 2020. In 2021, they could consider relaunching it as an opt-in project, where maintainers consent on a per-repository basis to deal with such t-shirt–incentivized contributors.
It seems like what could be done that's better for all involved, since there are reportedly (here in the comments) some repo maintainers that really like the program, would be to:
- Immediately suspend it while attempting to contact all the repo maintainers that are on the list
- Explain what's going on, apologiz, and give them the option at that point to opt in if they see benefit otherwise do nothing or decline to not be included
- Note on the Hacktoberfest project page the temporary suspendion for maybe a week while they get info back on who still wants to be included (and maybe some other repos volunteer, who knows).
To me that seems like a sane way to handle this (as opposed to the somewhat hyperbolic statements and suggestions in the article).
I think what would be quite effective is to simply stop giving away t-shirts. Or give them to everyone who registers. But I've seen how long engineers will wait in line for a free shirt at a conference and it is astonishing, so it's not a surprise to see what they are willing to do for a t-shirt here.
Step 1: Set up a website offering these shirts for $5 + S&H at some domain that seems like it's for DO outreach work.
Step 2: Set up a system that creates an account and automates some pull request.
Step 3: Tie the two together and drop ship the shirts to the person who paid for it through your site.
Step 4: Profit a small/moderate amount and have a repo you're the primary dev on that looks really attractive as a proof of work, resourcefulness, and willingness to ignore ethical questions to a lot of Silicon Valley startups.
You joke, but there are automated bots already submitting pull requests to try and get a massive number of shirts. Once they start shipping they end up on eBay and the like.
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