2026-01-07 18:28 UTC
@ploum@mamot.fr while I'm happy to see schools teaching OSS contributions, I worry this is creating one-off contributors similar to Hacktoberfest. From my experience, those are a net-negative for OSS maintainers.
Rather than pushing students to maintainers that didn't opt-in to be part of the classwork, consider maintaining your own OSS projects, maybe as part of another class.
Replies (1)
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@bmitch@fosstodon.org 2026-01-07 18:32
@ploum@mamot.fr I've seen far too many LLM generated contributions, that appear to be scattered across multiple projects, with no follow up to questions. I've always assumed these are reputation farming bots, but it's entirely possible it's the result of students trying to get one PR approved, and then they abandon all the others when that happens. At the very least, require students to have a public profile, including a link back to your class in case maintainers have feedback.