A bunch of people(developers) lashed back, while hoping that maybe it was just a mishap by their marketing department.
Then the lead developer of the project, kyungtaak, posted a comment saying that he would do it again if he had to because he "loves" the project so much. And that people just need to cut him some slack.
The developers got furious by the comment, and it's going semi-viral among developers in Korea.
The company shut down the event, and posted an apology.
That's for promoting your brand.
> Signup and Star and get coupons
That's against the open-source ecosystem spirit, where the number of stars is a measurement of project popularity.
> In GitHub, the weight of Star is heavier than you think. It is absolutely meaningful to mix in some leaps as to how devoted to the project are contributors, how high the completeness is, and how useful it is.
The page is in a foreign language and its contents have apparently since been changed.
What happened?
> metatron discovery event
> Event period: 7/1 (Mon) - 7/20 (Sat)
> How to participate: Please comment on this post after capturing screen shot of STAR on metatron discovery in GitHub.
> Announcement of winners: 7/23 (Tue) (Individual will be contacted)
> Prize guide [projector, monitor, headphones, keyboard, coffee]
[1] 국내에서.. 특히 대기업내에서 이런 오픈소스 프로젝트가 유지될수 있을 것으로 생각하는 이는 거의 없을 것이라고 생각합니다. 이런 환경속에서 저희로써는 매년 매순간 이 프로젝트가 잘 될 수 있다고 증명해야했고, 그 중 하나가 star 의 개수였습니다. -> I do not think there will be many people in the domestic market that think that such open source projects can be maintained, especially in large corporations. In this environment, we had to prove every year that the project could work well, One of them was the number of stars. -- quote from a comment by kyungtaak, a contributor.
Without knowing the language, the images at least imply that they're giving away free stuff in exchange for people signing up on github and starring their repo.
Translation from http://b2b.tworld.co.kr/bizts/notice/noticeDetail.bs?seqNo=0... Hello, company T world.
Metatron discovery event prematurely closed . We will send Starbucks gift cards through individual mail to those who participated in the event sequentially.
We will inform you about the early termination of the event below.
====================================================== =============================
Hi, I'm SK Telecom Metatron event manager.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. As soon as we realized that the event could be interpreted as an event that could harm the open source ecosystem, we ended the event as soon as possible.
As an event coordinator, I would like to encourage our products to be more widely known to more developers, and I apologize for any inconvenience to the event without fully understanding the open source ecosystem.
We take heed of the developers' complaints on this issue, and we will take this mistake as a lesson to deepen our understanding of open source and contribute to the ecosystem. In addition, we will continue to support our members who are working hard to develop Metatron in the future so that we can communicate more sincerely with developers.
I apologize again and again.
================================================== ============================
I will repay you with better service in the future.
Thank you.
The core dev seems to be unapologetic about buying stars saying that managent tracks that to judge the viability of the project, and that many other projects do it.
I personally think that, it is clear that this is some kind of abuse but unclear if it is actually a violation of Github's Acceptable Use Policies [1] or not, making the incident somewhat more troublesome. Hopefully Github can update the policies to counter this kind of abuse in the future.
[1] https://help.github.com/en/articles/github-acceptable-use-po...
The repo maintainer responds saying he agreed to the promotion as it is a way to show internally within the company that open source projects can be successful.
I didn’t read too much beyond that but that’s the gist of it.
Just make project look more popular? Seems odd.
Therefore, they made this ugly event.
Nope, stars are a stupid popularity contest that shouldn't have been a feature of Github in the first place. Leave that sort of stuff to Instagram "influencers" or whatever.
