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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 15 2022, @11:25PM
Now, what he did is perfectly legal. Read the standard disclaimer that comes with open-source software. The user does bot own it. They merely have a license to use it. This license comes with absolutely no warranty, including no warranty of fitness for use.
The developer i certainly has the right to render his own property non-functional, and that's what they did. because, in the end, the code is their property, not the users.
Anyone who's not happy is free to ask him for a full refund of their purchase price they paid him …
Don't like it? Pay a dev. A real dev. Not a cut-n-paste monkey. Your business model doesn't allow you to do that? Then your business model deserves to die.