This doesn't surprise me at all... Just like bots in games. Selling a service that benefits another. Its shady, but definitely believable.
Also, what if this is an actual viable way to "market" for an open source project?
You can buy any metric on the web. Amazon reviews, YouTube subscribers and likes, X followers, Reddit karma, …. I am not surprised that GitHub stars are one of them.
I am not a programmer. But I have been using github as an end user for years, downloading programs I like and whatnot. Today I realized there are stars on github. Literally never even noticed.
The stars are more important when you're a developer. It indicates interest in the project, and when it's a library you might want to use that translates into how well maintained it might be and what level of official and unofficial support you might get from it.
Other key things to look at are how often are they doing releases and committing changes, how long bugs are left open, if pull requests sit there forever without being merged in etc.
And if the developers were to give up on the project, how likely it would be for someone to fork it and continue.
If you’re trying to peddle malware then it’s a way to fake popularity
Yeah, this is a pretty good gauge of what an honest star rating should represent.
On the Caveat Emptor ("Let the buyer beware") side of things, I look at other metrics well before I rely on stars.
How many contributors does it have? How many active forks? How many pull requests? How many issues are open and how many get solved and how often and how lively are the discussions? When was the last merge? How active is the maintainer?
Stars might as well be facebook likes imo: when used as intended, they didn't say much more than "this is what the majority of people like" (surprise, I'm on lemmy bc I have other priorities than what's popular), now they mean nothing at all.
There is a clear situation in Foss( even more in self hosting) where projects are presented as free open source but they are intended to monetize at the end and use the community help for development.
There's nothing inherently wrong with monetizing FOSS. People gotta eat.
If I understand them correctly, @geography082@lemm.ee's point is not that it is wrong to monetize FOSS, but rather that companies increasingly develop open source projects for some time, benefiting from unpaid work in the form of contributions and, perhaps most importantly, starving other projects from both such contributions and funding, only to cynically change the license once they establish a position in their respective ecosystem and lock in enough customers. The last significant instance that I remember is Redis' case, but there seem to be ever more.
This happened in the earlier years of Android. Developers were FOSS until people helped them get the app to a polished state. Then close it and charge money. Make a big push to promote the paid app.
Can you give examples of this? What is the coat to the end user? Hardware, IT-services (VPS, and alike?) or like map providers using OSM data?
Isn't this kinda what the controversy around the ElastiSearch licensing change was about? I think people have had similar frustrations with HashiCorp software, but I don't know the details.
In my opinion that was a little different. The enterprise was using the software basically, contributing nothing but selling services around it. The licence was meant to force them to help out monetarily from what they were making off it. But rather than do that Mason forked it and now have to support their own imp with their own devs.
Which is just as good in my opinion if I am understanding the situation correctly.
how is twidium managing to charge so much more?
Their stars are hand crafted from raw virginal pixels by blind monks using only their toes.
Programming never needed these sorts of social media features in the first place. Do you part by getting your projects off of Microsoft’s social media platform used to try to sell you Copilot AI & take a cut of your donations to projects with Sponsors.
For reference, there is codeberg.org, operated by a German nonprofit and based on the open source Forgejo, among other open alternatives.
Federated repo hosting website when?
Radicle can do it presently but a lot folks dismissed them since they worked on cryptocurrency stuff independently. Weird thing to be hung up on considering they were separate endeavors, but folks are fickle.
Also, what if this is an actual viable way to “market” for an open-source project?
I am fortunate enough to not market my stuff:
If somebody finds and can make use of it. Great.
In the other case who cares? Didn't hurt or cost me anything to publish it.
Fake GitHub stares have other implications: Typosquatting is a real issue and fake stars make it more convincing that it is the genuine project.
Why a real person would star a project? When I star a project then my GitHub home is littered with activity from that project. I hate that, so I never star anything
you can turn off notifications from starred projects
For anyone interested in reading more on this type of thing, the colloquial term seems to be "SMM panel" where SMM is "social media marketing". EN Wikipedia has nothing of course, but DE has this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMM-Panel.
Link doesn't work for me on mobile.
Why would the En version "obviously" have nothing?
Why do you say it's obvious that the English wiki "has nothing"?
open collective has a minimum star limit to signup.
But they accepted our project even though we didn't meet it. I always thought it was silly, and was glad they were flexible.
Amazing. Good thing I don’t use GitHub :)
shouldn't this sort of thing destroy your algorithm ranking
Github is very naive and has 0 protection against spam-stars and multi-accounts.
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