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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?
Also cybersecurity implications here. Nefarious actors can prop up their evildoings with fake stars and pose as legitimate projects.
I almost commented something like "thats extremely overpriced, why dont you set up a raspberry pi to do it for you for free" and then i realized the people who could do that dont need fake stars.
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.
Why would it be? Software is good based on it's use and recommendations from real folk, not *s. Many project not on github
Yeah, I'd argue that the project can be good and not widely used. Do you think that there are projects with real use case and are great open source software and not widely used because its buried under the *s?
It could be a relatively inexpensive way for niche marketing. Especially if the developer has a payment option with the software. Probably a decent way to get the software out in the open for profitability, no?
That is more down to poor marketing. Here on Lemmy or reddit there are big open source communities where you can extol the values of it.
It’s frustrating to write something cool that you think others will really benefit from and just never see any adoption, while yet another cookie cutter project has like hundreds of stars.
That’s why I just write super niche things now that only a handful of people will ever even want. This way I can convince myself that the stars don’t matter haha.
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.
If you’re trying to peddle malware then it’s a way to fake popularity
That's unfair. Throwing out FUD doesn't make it true.
Why be in a rush to judge? Might wanna watch some projects which have used this tactic.
Might be legitimate projects are willing to do whatever to attract eye balls.
Just for shiats and giggles, keep an open mind.
I was pointing out a use case
Tbh I never look at stars, but do at prs and issues
Closed PRs and Closed issues?
What if it's a side project with 1 star, 0 issues (because no one made any) and no PRs because no ones done work on it?
More so if spme software had dozens or hundreds of open issues/PRs for months that never get looked at I'll look elsewhere
Don't want unstable dependencies
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
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.
I like hub.darcs.net & smeder.ee myself. Git is overrated.
Git is overrated.
That's interesting to read; I wasn't even aware of the existence of Darcs — or any other alternative to git supposedly worth considering, for that matter. Would you elaborate on it?
Pijul is also worth looking at.
Fundamentally anything with a snapshot-based model is reliant on patch order mattering. As such you always end up with some centralized server. Pijul & Darcs are based on Patch Theory that says if Patch B is applied before or after Patch A assuming there is no conflict or dependence, it should not matter in a communicative way—that is to say the 1 + 2 ≡ 2 + 1. You can avoid a series of conflicts & better support a distibuted/decentralized development model if the order doesn’t matter.
Who would buy from the last service?
Their prices are 5 times more expensive than the second most expensive service, their delay is the highest by far, and their minimum isnt even the smallest
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, @[email protected]'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.