Category: github, gitlab

With October suddenly upon us, it’s every open source maintainer’s favorite time of year – Hacktoberfest! At least in years past, Hacktoberfest, the annual “month-long celebration of the open-source community” put on by DigitalOcean wherein participants get some swag for successfully making pull requests to open source projects, has been occasionally controversial.

Beyond that, this year the company is encouraging participants to donate directly to open source projects by enabling donations through Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors, as well as bringing GitLab into the open source love fest, where “only contributions to repositories on GitLab that have ‘hacktoberfest’ as a topic will count.”

Complaints around spam aside — as one open source advocate points out, the net benefit may be worth more than the time it takes you to close out those spam pull requests — there are a number of open source projects out there ready and willing to take your contributions. So, if you’ve pondered contributing to open source, now may be the time — heck, you’ll get a t-shirt to boot.

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