I’d really like epithet to reserve that for people who are actively malicious. There are no signs to the contrary for the people submitting spam PRs being enthusiastic developers looking to get into open source and score some swag while they’re at it but lacking the guidance to really understand that they’re being annoying to other people.
Re:One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020
by quadrifoliate on Friday October 02, 2020 @01:15AM
(#24659131)
> Then, should we stop writing good code because some shitheads set a bad example?
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.
Re:One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020
by hombre_fatal on Friday October 02, 2020 @01:20AM
(#24659164)
Which of the article examples (or in-the-wild hacktoberfest PR) is a case of a "typo fix contribution" that you think was unfairly rejected?
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?