Cloud company Digital Ocean has started its seventh annual “Hacktoberfest” <https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/01/digitalocean_hacktoberfest_pull_request_spam/>, promising free T-shirts to those who submit “quality” pull requests to online open-source repositories. Seems this year, the “quality” proviso is being roundly ignored. Many project maintainers are being deluged with trivial and pointless patches, many of whose submittors readily admit they are only doing it for the T-shirt. Choice quote: Imagine an arsonist declaring, "Only you can prevent forest fires," and you can get a sense of the frustration among open source maintainers. Actually, I’m surprised this hasn’t happened in previous years. But then again, maybe it has: "Hacktoberfest has never generated anything of value for open source ... It’s a marketing stunt which sends a deluge of low-effort contributions to maintainers, leaving them to clean up the spam." There’s also a link to a rather pungently-named Twitter account which is collecting examples of these useless patch submissions.