What 316 GitHub Issues Teach Us About the Dark Side of Open Source

23/09/2025 9 min
What 316 GitHub Issues Teach Us About the Dark Side of Open Source

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Episode Synopsis



This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/what-316-github-issues-teach-us-about-the-dark-side-of-open-source.
OSS's first extensive investigation of unethical behavior, featuring taxonomy, an ontology-based detection tool (Etor), and an accuracy rate of 74.8%.
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From the viewpoint of stakeholders, this paper offers the first thorough analysis of unethical behavior in open-source software (OSS) initiatives. Our analysis of 316 GitHub problems from 301 repositories reveals 15 different forms of unethical activity, including six situations that haven't been examined before, including self-promotion, soft forking, misinformed licensing alterations, and naming confusion.


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