I'm not Indian, and I think the reputation comes largely from the proportion of educated people not behind the Great Firewall of China that are Indian, and people mistaking “the proportion of people who do I see do X thar are from Y background” with “the proportion of people from Y background who do X”.
But the bullshit is real, and its frustrating.
I think that we are in agreement regarding that? I have no right to complain about it either.
I can offer advice to bypass Open Source contributions altogether, which would have the side effect of stopping incidents like this. And it's not like projects are starved for README contributions either, coding bootcamps or someone else will pick up the slack.
Let me be clear, when you write open source code there are incentives like creating / improving tool for our own use, experimenting, or having a legitimate contribution, even if it is for sake of resume. The software we want to write as OSS is often not the software we can write as proprietary, sell and make money.
Should we give up all the advantages of open source for our side projects? Aren't other people contributing to open source and that's making world better? Should we do a disservice to ourselves and open source community because some people among us have created a bad reputation?
It's not like anyone says "He is Indian, his contribution is probably worthless" about Sanjay Ghemawat or Vikram Adve, right?
No, I'm saying that we should write great code, and not open source any of it. I don't understand why the concept is so unpopular?
> It's not like anyone says "He is Indian, his contribution is probably worthless" about Sanjay Ghemawat or Vikram Adve, right?
Absolutely not. But I think that today, if Ghemawat made a typo fix contribution to 10 random projects for Hacktoberfest, at least one of those project maintainers who didn't know about him would be yelling about "spam". I'm not sure how to prove this; maybe someone who knows him can ask him to try? :) This is HN after all.
Also, since you bring it up, I'm guessing that the vast majority of Sanjay's code at Google is proprietary and not available to the world.
The reputation comes from mediocre youtube tutorials, sweatshops like TCS and infosys, bullshit sites like geeksforgeeks, and incidents like this.
I am an Indian, and I think I have no right to complain about that reputation.