Comment by not_your_vase

2 years ago

There is a help-wanted tag on github for this: https://github.com/topics/help-wanted

(I know that GH is not the whole world, but it stores an overwhelming majority of the OSS ecosystem)

Funny that all Microsoft projects appear on top. They seem to struggle very hard.

  • To be honest, I think it is true. They declared "issue bankruptcy" in one of they repo:

    https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript-Website/issues/2804

    Contrary to many people's perception, Microsoft is one of the biggest contributors to open source, whether for projects they "own" like TypeScript or VSCode, or other common projects like Linux. The amount of users and bugs/feature requests etc don't match headcounts available at Microsoft.

  • The list is ranked in a completely transparent way. It's anything with the help wanted tag, ordered by number of stars.

    So this isn't some sneaky Microsoft thumb on the scale, the way you appear to be implying. Simpler than that: I doubt many projects know about this list (I for one just saw it for the first time), and since GitHub put it together, Microsoft codebases got the memo to add the tag.

    If you want to see other popular projects at the top of this list, open up a PR to have them add the tag.

    • Personally I find it funny one of the most valuable companies in the world is begging for free help maintaining their software. Gotta be cheap to get rich I guess.

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