I just read about Spamtoberfest on Drew Devault’s blog:
The short version is that Digital Ocean has this publicity stunt called Hacktoberfest where they offer a free t-shirt to anybody who submits a pull request (PR) to a software project hosted on GitHub and gets their PR accepted. Naturally, this results in spam: lots of low-quality PRs that consist mainly of making trivial changes to a project’s README file, instead of useful PRs that fix bugs.
I’m glad I don’t do FOSS development myself and don’t have to deal with this foolishness. I’d probably just announce that I was taking October off and that all PRs submitted while I was away would get summarily rejected on my return. Then I would ignore all pull requests for the entire month and make good on my threat to deny all PRs submitted between 09/30 and 11/01 on the first Monday night in November. If legitimate PRs get chucked as well, too bad.
However, this also reminds me of kevinsan’s gemlog post about burnout in Attack Vectors in FOSS:
Just like ‘marketing’ companies will use their networks of ‘influencers’, whether in-house or contracted, to shill your product or service, there’s no reason why they couldn’t just turn their efforts to trolling open source developers where, for example, the software being developed stands in the way of their client’s profit.
At a glance, this might seem a risky strategy for any organisation to pursue. Engaging a marketing company for such nefarious purposes risks a lot of negative exposure.
On the other hand, tacit understanding is a thing. If you talk to a hundred marketing companies, asking for novel ways to tackle the scourge of their open-source competition, perhaps mentioning stuff anecdotally, it’s very likely that at least one of them will be on track to arrive at trolling as an option. All that remains to do is tacit acknowldgement, simply by engaging the services of that specific agency, to pursue the goal.
It’s often the most incompetent and naive users that cause the most frustration to support, and there are plenty of incompetent people willing to sell their soul in the ‘gig economy’. Add rudeness and entitlement to that, and you’ve got the perfect wind-up mechanism to make developers think ‘Fuck it. I’ve had enough!’.
I don’t want to say that this is what Digital Ocean is doing without solid evidence, but I’m not convinced that the people who came up with Hacktoberfest thought things through and considered the burden they’d be placing on FOSS developers and maintainers who still use GitHub. Working for free is inherently already tends to result in burnout. Having the free work you do made harder by people who would otherwise happily ignore your project if there wasn’t a crappy t-shirt in it for them can only make matters worse.
Fortunately, this isn’t my problem. If I wanted to work for free, I could put in some overtime at my day job.