The real question when you look at a list of new repos is not “which has the most stars” but “which of these can I stand up as a service this week”. Three filters, each cutting a different failure mode — and the third one is the one that kills most of them.
Filter 1: Docker at the repo root
I read the root tree of all 615 repos through the GitHub Trees API and looked for `Dockerfile`, `docker-compose.yml` / `.yaml`, `compose.yml` / `.yaml`, or a `docker/` directory. No guessing from the description — counting actual files.
- 24 repos (3.9%) have a Dockerfile at the root, and 11 of those (1.8%) ship a compose file.
- 13 repos (2.1%) have a `docker/` directory but no file at the root.
- Combined: 38 repos (6.2%) have some path to a Docker build near the root.
- In other words: 94% of this week's new repos cannot be stood up as a service with one command. That is the most important number in this post.
Filter 2: does the licence let you sell a hosted version
Of the 38 Docker-capable repos, 19 carry a permissive licence (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, ISC). That is the group you may package, extend and sell hosted without publishing the code you write. The rest: 9 repos with no licence at all (no commercial use), 4 NOASSERTION, 3 AGPL, 3 GPL-3.0.
- If you intend to sell: look only at MIT and Apache-2.0. AGPL can be hosted unmodified, but modify it and serve it over a network and you must publish your changes.
- 9 Docker-capable repos have no licence — under default copyright you have no rights at all, not even running it inside your own company.
- Across all 615 repos, 209 (34%) carry no licence. Worth remembering whenever someone says “open source”.
Filter 3: are real people behind it
Stars say nothing about whether a repo is maintained. I took the 30 most-starred repos and counted commits and contributors through the API:
- 14 of the 30 (47%) have exactly one contributor; 20 (67%) have two or fewer.
- 2 repos — including day-trader-skill with 1,697 stars — have exactly one commit. That repo is a single push of code.
- Only 11 of 30 (37%) pass 100 commits. Median: 41 commits and 2 contributors.
- For contrast: harp has 2,565 commits and 171 contributors; NVIDIA's flare-local-inference has 900 commits and 11.
A one-commit repo with 1,700 stars is not a project. It is a piece of content posted to GitHub — possibly worth reading, but it cannot take issues, has no maintainer, and has no history to depend on.
The funnel
- 615 new repos → 38 with Docker → 19 that permit a hosted product → 8 of those 19 with more than one contributor.
- Widen the criterion to “more than one contributor *or* over 8 commits” and you get 14 repos. Median across the 19: 28 commits and 1 contributor.
- The shortlist worth a look as a service: argus (89 stars, 46 commits, agentic security ops), agentshield (51 stars, 24 commits, K8s/AWS defense), AutoMorph (170 stars, 32 commits, self-hosted Android patching), radar-public-sector (87 stars, 28 commits, FastAPI public-tender monitoring), arkdraw (45 stars, 55 commits, 3 contributors, UML/ER diagrams).
- A telling counter-example: on the star board Ztrust (153 stars) looks like the strongest of the Docker+MIT group — but it has exactly 1 commit and 1 contributor. Highest stars, thinnest history.
- That is five names in one week. Not 615, and not 38 either.
Running the same three filters over the 100 open-source projects with the most cumulative stars yields a far longer and more stable list — see the 100-project roundup, which includes licence breakdowns per tier. The raw 615-repo dataset and the star-velocity defect: this week's data post.
Sources: GitHub Trees API, GitHub Search API and each repo's commits/contributors endpoints, as of 26 October 2026.