DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest is Hurting Open Source

For the last couple of years, DigitalOcean has run Hacktoberfest, which purports to “support open source” by giving free t-shirts to people who send pull requests to open source repositories. In reality, Hacktoberfest is a corporate-sponsored distributed denial of service attack against the open source maintainer community. So far today, on a single repository, myself and fellow maintainers have closed 11 spam pull requests. Each of these generates notifications, often email, to the 485 watchers...