Open Source Developers, Who Work for Free, Are Discovering They Have Power

Owen Williams, writing for TechCrunch: [...] As a result, it shouldn't be a surprise that some open source developers are beginning to realize they wield outsized power, despite the lack of compensation they receive for their work, because their projects are used by some of the largest, most profitable companies in the world. In early January, for example, Marak Squires, the developer of two popular NPM packages, 'colors' and 'faker,' intentionally introduced changes to their code that broke their functionality for anyone using them, outputting "LIBERTY LIBERTY LIBERTY" followed by gibberish and an infinite loop when used. While Squires didn't comment on the reason for making the changes, he had previously said on GitHub that "I am no longer going to support Fortune 500s ( and other smaller sized companies ) with my free work." Squires' changes broke other popular projects, including Amazon's Cloud Development Kit, as his libraries were installed almost 20 million times per week on npm, with thousands of projects directly depending on them. Within a few hours, NPM had rolled back the rogue release and GitHub suspended the developer's account in response. While NPM's response was to be expected after previous incidents in which malicious code was added to libraries and was ultimately rolled back to limit damage, GitHub's was a new one: the code hosting platform took down Squires' entire account, even though he was the owner of the code and was his rights to change it as he pleased. This isn't the first time a developer has pulled their code in protest, either. The developer of 'left-pad' pulled his code from NPM in 2016, breaking tens of thousands of websites that depended on it following a fight with the Kik messenger over the naming of another open source project he owned. What's astonishing is that despite the occasional high-profile libraries protesting the way the industry works, these types of incidents aren't all that common: open source developers continue to work for free, maintaining their projects as best they can, even though multi-million dollar products being created off of the back of their work.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.