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 more to the story.

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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. The developer of these libraries intentionally introduced an infinite loop that bricked thousands of projects that depend on them. The reason behind this mischief on the developer's part appears to be retaliation against mega-corporations and commercial consumers who rely on cost-free and community-powered software.

Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker' breaking thousands of apps

wow… this is insane. I’ve just spent the last hour-odd reading various different sources, sharing different sides of this story, and it’s just downright brutal on all accounts.
IMHO, none of it was handled very well at all, including the Fortune 500 tycoons that (at least appear to) take advantage of OSS, and Marak himself with the way he responded to all of it… all-in-all, this whole things is just sad, and unfortunately could even continue to affect many other projects for a long time to come.
there’s nothing quite as inhumane as “humanity” hey… :(

GitHub definitely crossed a line by locking Maraks account. It’s his project and he is entitled to host it on there. There’s nothing even malicious about it. I do assume however that they will unblock him (if you want to give them the benefit of doubt it might be that they thought his account was hijacked).
NPM on the other hand is I think in their right to take away his repo and people are in their right to criticise him. If he does stuff like this out of spite (which this is) he hurts everyone not just big corporations. Imagine a healthcare worker injecting patients with wrong medicine to “stick it” to big pharma hospitals.
There are better ways to fight this and this move comes either from desperation or insanity. Given what he prints in the bricked code you get to decide which one you think it is.
Maybe this is not just a story about money. Maybe the bigger picture here should be the mental health of developers in general (OSS maintainers most importantly).

Github should be sanctioned for this, so that Marak can raise the money he needs to continue helping the community.👀