I feel bad for the repository maintainer, but they take Digital Ocean's initiative in extremely bad faith during this article. People are frequently incentivized to do the wrong thing and, oh look, here we are. This situation could be resolved or at least improved upon by Hacktoberfest and a load of maintainers sitting down and talking things out.
This is a comms problem, not a "corporate-sponsored distributed denial of service attack against the open source maintainer community". The well-meaning frequently cause more problems than they solve, but it is better to have them on the inside of the tent pissing out than on the outside of the tent pissing in, it is said.
No, this article never even implies DO is doing this intentionally. The tone is annoyed, even aggrieved, but not really angry. The author, in fact, seems to be rightly applying Hanlon's Razor, and is constructively figuring out how to fix this unintended down-side to what should be a nice gesture by DO.
Perhaps, but actively saying things like “most importantly, we can remember that this is how DigitalOcean treats the open source maintainer community, and stay away from their products going forward.”
Which is not constructive. I think DO should sort this out and there’s any number of decent options just in this HN thread, but this post is only going to help if it generates enough negative publicity on HN for DO to recognize. In and of itself, it’s just another fed-up dev.
This is a comms problem, not a "corporate-sponsored distributed denial of service attack against the open source maintainer community". The well-meaning frequently cause more problems than they solve, but it is better to have them on the inside of the tent pissing out than on the outside of the tent pissing in, it is said.