Open Source Coders: Get Free Stuff from Digital Ocean's Hacktoberfest

Cloud hosting company Digital Ocean and GitHub want open source developers to celebrate October by uploading open source code—and they’re sponsoring “Hacktoberfest” giveaways to spur the programmers on.

Depending on your personal preferences, writing open source code may or may not be as much fun as consuming beer as part of (the modern American reinvention of) Oktoberfest. Either way, Hacktoberfest doesn’t involve any free beer.

But it does involve free t-shirts for anyone who submits at least four pull requests to an open source project hosted on GitHub. (Pull requests are geek-technical speak for a way of integrating new code into software.) Digital Ocean and GitHub will track this information automatically and contact coders who have met the requirement on Nov. 2.

That’s not all. Digital Ocean is also promoting open source this month by highlighting a different open source project each day on its website. In addition, the company is helping sponsor the jQuery Developer Summit this month in New York, which aims to expose underrepresented groups to open source programming. (They’re numerous, by the way). It also sponsored a similar event a few days ago.

No one’s saying t-shirts should be the primary motivator for people to contribute to open source. But if you’re already an open source programmer, or you’ve always wanted to be, Hacktoberfest could be a nice opportunity for helping to make open code better while also stocking up on free clothing for the coming winter months.

For more information, heck out Digital Ocean’s blog. The company, founded in 2011, offers cloud hosting and has rapidly expanded its hosting services in the last several years.