faker.js - generate massive amounts of fake data in the browser and node.js
Dreaming of been free
Imagine you woke up in the morning and decided to create something to ease your repetitive task of generating data anytime you create project
That’s how it started for Marak 8 years ago with the all-time favorite random JS data generation library Faker. It was a sincere and honest endeavour to freely push out such a handy tool both for huge corporations and small teams that took advantage of a faster & smoother seeding generator for test data.
In October 2020 Marak added a commit to the Faker repository confirming the most dreaded situation in open source (Lack of funding) When you create a piece of software and people use it you expect to make money of it, but that’s not valid with open source libraries that are entirely based on donations.
The countless added features to the Faker codebase over the years increased the maintenance cost and time invested into the project.
It’s a known fact in the industry that no matter how great your open source library may be, if a big tech firm doesn’t sponsor it, you are pretty much broke. Marak knew this and made this point very clearly in his post that he will stop maintaining until he will receive a full salary offer since he had no income. Now, this is where it gets interesting, this final commit added to the reader file the cryptic line that still haunts me as I’m writing this article https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/rwcccz/what_happened_to_fakerjs/.
A few days after the erasure of Faker & FakerCloud off the face of the internet, Marak pushed a controversial update to another of his maintained libraries colors.js.
A glimpse of hope
You can still install an older version of faker.js and view the docs at faker.dev
$ npm i faker@5.5.3
or alternatively, Faker is now a community project. Visit faker-js/faker, docs at fakerjs.dev and use npm install @faker-js/faker.
Hope you liked this content, see you later.
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