Very true, the left-pad incident from 2016 may have seemed like a one off occurrence but we see protestware revived this year.
1. colors/faker followed the Log4j debacle and was more about corporations using open source heavily but not giving back enough to support the developers so the dev threw in the towel. Applications using 'colors' began freezing (entered a DoS condition) due to an infinite loop introduced by the developer in the code.
2. But with node-ipc, the self-sabotage turned destructive with the package actively deleting files on detecting a Russian/Belarusian host IP
3. event-source-polyfill, styled-components, etc. have adopted more a more "peaceful protest" approach by expressing the maintainer's views condemning the Russian war, but without engaging in outright destructive activity.
Thus far the trends have been about open source and the ongoing war.
But developers have discovered a new avenue of their creative expression (open source) which no longer limits them to simply coding the intended application functionality. And so, the questions that arise are, what will the next protest be about and if we are prepared for it?
1. colors/faker followed the Log4j debacle and was more about corporations using open source heavily but not giving back enough to support the developers so the dev threw in the towel. Applications using 'colors' began freezing (entered a DoS condition) due to an infinite loop introduced by the developer in the code.
2. But with node-ipc, the self-sabotage turned destructive with the package actively deleting files on detecting a Russian/Belarusian host IP
3. event-source-polyfill, styled-components, etc. have adopted more a more "peaceful protest" approach by expressing the maintainer's views condemning the Russian war, but without engaging in outright destructive activity.
Thus far the trends have been about open source and the ongoing war.
But developers have discovered a new avenue of their creative expression (open source) which no longer limits them to simply coding the intended application functionality. And so, the questions that arise are, what will the next protest be about and if we are prepared for it?