About Four (4) Days Ago, the Author of Fakerjs a popular JavaScript library with more than 2 million weekly Download from NPM Deleted the repository and replaced it with one that only has the modified ReadMe "What really happened with Aaron Swartz?" and no content, and pushed an empty package to npm as the latest version (6.6.6).
The name of the new commit is called ENDGAME
Why I Think He Did It
Marak develops this very useful tool and gives it away for free, receives praise but no money. After realising that there is no money in giving stuff for free with no further plan down the road, gets cranky as others are not giving Marak free services and don't accept applause as a payment method,And says that someone needs to pay for it or take over the development. Declares that will no longer do free work for corporations, but corporations seems to be unimpressed that the free worker will no longer work.
Since no one seems to be interested to pay for work offered for free, Marak launches SaaS of the tool as fakercloud.com (Now offline due to hosting renewal), which is a popular strategy and sometime can actually work.
Unfortunately, according to Marak, engineers from Retool copy the SaaS platform and launch it as a part of Retool. Marak realising what has happened offers the CEO of Retool to sell the fakercloud.com to them. The CEO ghosts Marak, maybe because doesn't want give evidence for a lawsuit or maybe doesn't see the point of purchasing a product that the internal engineers already build.
He Wrote A blog Post About it
you can read it here since his blog is down
https://web.archive.org/web/20210516172305/https://marak.com/blog/2021-04-25-monetizing-open-source-is-problematic
As a result, Marak gets angry and deletes everything and posts conspiracy theory memes and links everywhere. As this tool is a popular one and people depend on it, NPM suspends Marak's account and continues to provide latest working version that Marak gave them for free.
What Impact Does This Have To The Opensource ?
leave a comment below
crawled from here
Want Contribute to Marak, Here is his open collective for faker
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