GitHub Stars Are a Lie. MariaDB Just Proved It.
MariaDB wants to embed star-begging prompts directly into its server logs and client output to hit 10k GitHub stars. It sounds harmless — until you realize it breaks the unspoken contract that made stars meaningful. When maintainers engineer the metric they’re being measured by, the entire star economy collapses into noise. This isn’t about one PR. It’s about the industrialization of enthusiasm in open source.