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The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/Rythemeius on 2024-02-01 01:30:34.

Hello everyone,

I recently received an email from a company interested in placing an advertisement for their product (a product as a service) near the top of the README of one of my GitHub repositories. I received this offer through my personal email, which has left me puzzled about how they obtained it in the first place. I haven’t replied yet.

The company is offering compensation in exchange for this placement. For context, the repository in question hosts a moderately popular Python package. It sees a few thousand downloads a day, has a few hundred stars on GitHub, and attracts less than 50 unique visitors daily to the README page. I’m the maintainer and the sole regular contributor of this repository.

I’m reaching out to this community to gather some opinions on a few points:

  1. Privacy Concerns: How might the company have accessed my personal email, and does this raise any red flags? My email doesn’t seem to appear in the commit details anywhere.
  2. Prevalence of Such Offers: Is it common for companies to approach open-source maintainers with proposals like this? If you’ve had similar experiences, how did you handle them?
  3. Ethical and Community Considerations: What are the ethical implications of accepting such an offer? How is it generally viewed within the open-source community?

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences.