This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/brianllamar on 2024-04-11 01:39:23.

I have some thoughts I have been thinking about for a bit and thought I’d share them here for discussion.

I don’t think there is an argument about whether GitHub is the place for open source. Overwhelmingly, most new projects choose GitHub and looking back in 2023, the biggest projects with the highest star growth (the current metric for success) can be attributed these large star events to intentional marketing.

There was a time when open source was driven by weekend code sessions; but today, open source is fueled by sustainable sponsorship conversations and venture capital. This is not entirely a bad thing, as it provides a sustainable future for the biggest projects we get to use and love.

The challenge in this new reality is defining what is worth looking at and whether GitHub Stars are still relevant for discovering projects worth your time. Correlating the best metric to identify projects to invest your time in depends on who has the biggest reach in a community. This seems contrary to how open source started and marks a shift in how we think about success in open source moving forward. These high growth moments are now indicators of significant events like appearing on a subreddit or getting mentioned by a developer influencer on YouTube.

My question is, what is success in open source?