[sega_sai]

5000 stars. That's an interesting threshold. I've checked and astropy -- the main python module used by pretty much every python user in astrophysics has 5100 stars. I would guess almost no open source code in science would pass the threshold.

EDIT: Just another test, one of the most used codes in astro -- an ensemble Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo sampler https://github.com/dfm/emcee has 1600 stars. It just shows the 5000 stars is a bit PR, rather than a serious attempt to help open source.

[andersmurphy]

On the bright side it means mostly JS/TS libraries will get slopified (as they tend to have the most stars thanks to ecosystem size). Small mercies.

[isodev]

Number of stars also excludes self hosted forges. Stars is more of a GitHub-wants-to-be-a-social thing than actual measure of popularity.

[cmrdporcupine]

Yeah, I was going to come here to say this. Apart from a) stars are a dubious metric b) 5000 stars is an insanely high bar, there is the issue that there are definitely lots of projects that choose not to partake in GitHub at this point.

That said, they do have a "contact us" line in there which implies some flexibility.

[ryandrake]

You can easily buy stars in bulk, like you can buy social media “likes” so they are kind of measuring the wrong thing and incentivizing the wrong behaviors.

[jefftk]

It also strongly favors older projects, since stars don't expire and they've had longer to accumulate them.

[limagnolia]

I don't even star the vast majority of packages I use... I usually only star repos I don't use but find interesting and may want to refer back to in the future.

And completely excludes projects not hosted on Microsoft's GitHub or NPM (Though they do say you can contact them if you don't meet their insane criteria).