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posted by janrinok on Wednesday January 12 2022, @01:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the with-great-responsibility-comes-great-LOLability dept.

From Bleeping Computer

Users of popular open-source libraries 'colors' and 'faker' were left stunned after they saw their applications, using these libraries, printing gibberish data and breaking.

Some surmised if the NPM libraries had been compromised, but it turns out there's much more to the story.

The developer of these libraries intentionally introduced an infinite loop that bricked thousands of projects that depend on 'colors and 'faker'.

The colors library receives over 20 million weekly downloads on npm alone, and has almost 19,000 projects depending on it. Whereas, faker receives over 2.8 million weekly downloads on npm, and has over 2,500 dependents.

But the target of this action wasn't the end user - but the big corporations...

[...] The reason behind this mischief on the developer's part appears to be retaliation—against mega-corporations and commercial consumers of open-source projects who extensively rely on cost-free and community-powered software but do not, according to the developer, give back to the community.

In November 2020, Marak had warned that he will no longer be supporting the big corporations with his "free work" and that commercial entities should consider either forking the projects or compensating the dev with a yearly "six figure" salary.

"Respectfully, I am no longer going to support Fortune 500s ( and other smaller sized companies ) with my free work. There isn't much else to say," the developer previously wrote.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday January 12 2022, @08:11PM (2 children)

    by Rich (945) on Wednesday January 12 2022, @08:11PM (#1212196) Journal

    Youthful anger fit. Tsss. He could've just announced "improvements" with generous advance information, and eventually implemented them. With subtle incompatibilities that would only affect a handful of fringe cases that are "using it wrong". Waited until the shit hit the fan. And then maintained the standpoint that the changes are a necessary improvement for the sake of happiness of mankind. Apple gets away with that on every new spin of their OS.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 13 2022, @01:32AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 13 2022, @01:32AM (#1212272)

    You forgot the crucial steps of selling support, whereby one first accepts CC details, under the proviso that one will give a refund if it is an actual bug, and not really a feature / user mistake.

    That way one can *always* profit. (MSFT's secret cash cow. Also the cash cow of every small PC shop ever: reinstalling windows for a fee).

    Other than that, I thought you were talking about MSFT and not APPL for a bit there. Of course, we've come full circle now, and APPL is taking over from MSFT who previously took over from IBM... I guess that dates me.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 15 2022, @04:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 15 2022, @04:00PM (#1212939)
    Or do a Redhat and require systemd.