> This was not intentional The goal was to let all you know about the rebrand of the project, ONLY.

That is not the defense you think it is, given that is also a violation of anti-spam and privacy laws in many jurisdictions, and of GitHub's ToS. One unsolicited e-mail is still unsolicited e-mail. What you intended to do was also wrong.

I understand this now.

And believe me, if we had known how people would have reacted - even with the one single e-mail about us changing completely the name of org and repo - we would have not done it.

It's midnight here and am still apologising to everyone for this. It's frustrating, but it's the only thing we can do now.

Just something that stood out to me from the wording. Get some sleep, not much more immediate damage control you can do I'd say.

I think people are probably curious how you got a list of emails of people who have starred your repo(s) on GitHub? Personally I don't think "please add my email to a database" as being included in starring a repo. Maybe there's something in the TOS or a community understanding I'm not aware of.

I'm not trying to pile on or push negativity to you and the project; if this is what you intended to do (and I don't have too much reason to doubt) then it's a different flavor of spam than recruiters/blogspam contacting us or signing us up for stuff without our consent.

> curious how you got a list of emails of people who have starred your repo

No mystery there; “stargazing” is one the public [1] social networking features that GitHub provides, and the email address that you write to your Git commits [2] becomes public when you share those commits on the internet.

[1]: https://github.com/OpenBB-finance/OpenBBTerminal/stargazers

[2]: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-First-Time-Gi...

"Letting you all know about the rebrand of the project" is still unwanted marketing that no project should engage in. Whether it's going to be continuous or not doesn't change that.

The irony is you're using a public platform to apologise for this, whereby people chose to come - it's not been foisted upon them. I'd imagine it gained you quite some interest in the project at first. You could have used the same means with some extra content to make the click worth it. This just looks sketchy and you may have alienated a number of potential users. Yes it's only an email but the demographic here is a little different to the norm.