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Ankit Beniwal
Ankit Beniwal

Posted on • Updated on

Is Hacktoberfest really doing more bad than good?

I know many developers out there have started their open source journey with this festival which is promoting open source community. And I congratulate those developers and Digital Ocean as well.

We all know that Pull Requests are the heart of collaboration. Whenever someone opens a PR, they propose their changes and request that someone review their changes and merge them.

But on the other hand there is this problem which revolves around the free T-Shirt which is given to developer who submits 4 PRs. I actually like the concept. Nevertheless, there are individuals who are not motivated to jump in the open source world but just wants to get the free T-Shirt. And to do so they are ready to stoop to a level where they open completely rubbish PRs.

I read this article on Domenic's Blog which took it too far to say

Hacktoberfest is a corporate-sponsored distributed denial of service attack against the open source maintainer community.

And it lead to a chain of reactions from people around the world.

There is this Dev Post by Thew Dhanat.

Then there are so many reddit conversations where developers are giving their reactions.

On the positive side, I read this on Hacktoberfest's official site-

Support open source and pick a limited edition T-shirt or plant a tree.

So, What do you think about this? and what solution can you suggest for this situation?

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