OceanBase Star Buying Scandal: Is China’s Top Database Purchasing GitHub Stars?

OceanBase is an enterprise‑level distributed relational database fully developed by Ant Group, launched in 2010. It offers strong data consistency, high availability, high performance, online scalability, broad SQL compatibility with mainstream databases, and low cost.

As China’s most recognized distributed relational database, it is frequently showcased by Ant Group as a flagship technology and has been adopted by many traditional sectors such as banking, securities, and telecommunications, with notable users including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China Merchants Securities.

In June 2021, OceanBase 3.0 was released, bringing high‑performance capabilities for both transaction processing and analytical workloads, thus becoming an HTAP‑capable enterprise database.

The same year the product was open‑sourced, the OceanBase community was launched and 3 million lines of core code were made publicly available. By 23 October 2021 the project had accumulated about 3.5 k stars on GitHub.

Despite the modest star count compared with other Alibaba‑group open‑source projects, recent rumors claim that the OceanBase community engaged in “buying” GitHub stars.

Screenshots from a community chat show messages encouraging users to give gifts for stars, offering incentives for inviting friends, and even acknowledging that such practices may violate GitHub’s user agreement.

Community members questioned the legality of the activity, and a senior engineer (referred to as “P9”) responded that the promotion was halted after a few hours, though later messages suggested the campaign continued.

The incident sparked broader criticism of “star‑inflation” in Chinese open‑source projects, where stars have become a metric for marketing rather than a genuine indicator of project quality.

Readers are invited to share their opinions on the prevalence of star‑buying and its impact on projects like OceanBase.