According to Theregister reports, an open source project on Github is problematic, it was achieved through free drinks in exchange for increasing the number of star. The incident on a website, Korea's largest wireless communications provider SK Telecom operator exposure, SK Telecom is the project sponsor, this promotion has been discontinued.
The project is Metatron Discovery, which is an application of real-time data analysis, based on a customized version of Apache Druid. Achieved some results under the effect of this activity, the project has nearly 2,500 star.
GitHub is a public bookmark the star sign, star mark on the user to a project that will mark its concern at the project, so they can easily find it again. Although different social media "like" button, but it has some similar characteristics, GitHub repository in the trend list. GitHub said:
We observed a variety of data points, including stars, forks, commits, follows and pageviews, and they have been appropriately weighted.
Metatron Discovery participate in the project developers opposed to this, they presented a paper entitled "Stop abusing GitHub Star" and "[Warn] [GitHub] [Abuse] the opportunity to get free Starbucks beverages by the star repo". One developer said, "I do not think it's helpful for contributors include SK Telecom employees, including, this behavior is undermining all the efforts, because the community has made GitHub star to become a valuable indicator."
Why do such a promotional activity?
Metatron Discovery Project Leader This is explained in a brief apology article, said an open source project is difficult to survive in a large company, the number of high star will help prove its worth, but despite this, so obvious and an increase in the case of open star currently not clear yet.
A developer from the company said:
We fully respect the voice of the community, we decided to re-set our store, we are waiting for Github response to the program, we will follow their guidelines, we will continue to listen to and respect the voices of society and make the greatest efforts to comply with open source ecosystem spirit . Once again, we deeply regret and apologize.
This incident shows, GitHub as the popularity of the project intent developer-to-developer guide it can easily be abused.