Don’t Just Contribute To Open Source, Participate

An attempt to add an song to Deno in the name of Hacktoberfest

For the last couple of years, DigitalOcean has been running Hacktoberfest with the intent to contribute to open source by giving free t-shirts to people who send pull requests to open source repositories.

While it’s a nice idea it misses the mark and in practice the net results is sponsored spam as a service that wastes both the times of maintainers and contributors.

While a lot of the complaints on this has been on the spam factor, which certainly is annoying it isn’t the end of the world and the harm done by DigitalOcean here will pass soon enough.

I think the bigger issue is that it asks for the wrong thing, it incentivises people to just contribute to open source rather than participating.

What’s The Difference

So what’s the difference? when I say contributing I’m thinking of the the instances where someone shows up with a nice little patch from out of nowhere. Once it gets merged then that person is gone forever along with their domain specific knowledge and rationale for doing something a particular way.

Now its not a bad thing to just contribute, and as a maintainer you’re ususally pretty pleased with getting patches like that.