Marak
Same Concerns on Faker.js license change
I'm also the owner of a famous open-source project called NPOI. I'm originally from China mainland. I live in Malaysia now.
I just casually check your status today to see if you have a job or business to live well. I got to know your story from the news a few years ago. I'm NOT your enemy or someone wanna bully you. I can help you I think. I have been fighting in China .NET open source community for years. I have to admit China open-source community is also in a mess. No one really follows the license.
NPOI got the same problem of bullying in late 2020. Someone in China community stole the code and created a 'standalone' version called Dotnetcore.NPOI. After I reviewed the code and figured out that this repo is not originally migrated by these guys, I reported this issue to Microsoft nuget team.
However, it's not the end of the story. These young developers started their instane revenge plan and eventually got me out of my job in iHerb. Since then, the war begins. I used 4 years to win the war. I think the key is to control the media of developers. If you have media, you have everything. It's not about coding skills, it's about propaganda and marketing which is very strong skill I learnt from China government.
I did notice you created a few tickets in Fake.js repo about the license issues. https://github.com/faker-js/faker/issues/3430 https://github.com/faker-js/faker/issues/3409
And the attitude of these current maintainers has changed since I saw this old issue
Frankly speaking, it's so weird that they totally remove you from this project while you have been maintaining Fake.js for 6-8 years. (Sorry I don't know the exact time because the original repo is not there).
Let me know your thoughts. I think we can do something to get control of Fake.js project again.
Including Marak on the documentation for the new project is nothing more than a technical legal requirement and a professional courtesy. They lost the moral right of attribution when they intentionally sabotaged their own package, causing chaos in both live servers and the open source community, all because they didn't think they were getting paid enough.
@Abion47 I see what he did is not proper behavior. But do you agree that he contributed a lot in fake.js and color.js in the past 15 years? (Sorry, I don't have the exact timeline)
And you guys keep saying that he did something bad then everything he contributed can be erased. This is not correct!
Did I miss something in the story of fake.js project?
@Abion47 It looks that you guys have given him a death sentence in open-source community due to his improper behavior?
I'm a bit curious who is the Judge in this community?
@tonyqus It's not like he had an accident or made a mistake. He very deliberately broke both faker.js and colors.js knowing full well that it would crash, as a low estimate, tens of thousands of live services running around the world - some of them mission-critical to the companies that hosted them. They are still broken to this day; he refuses to fix them even now, long after he made his point.
This goes well beyond "not proper behavior". He's deliberately burned everything he worked for and screwed over a lot of other small businesses and open-source projects just to spite a few corpos. Sure, he created some very popular packages, but all the good will he garnered in that time he threw away when he took them down in the most nuclear way possible. You don't get to do what he did and then write it off like it was just one minor bad event.
And it's not like he was toiling day in and day out maintaining it for the entirety of that 15 years. If you look at the commit history, he hadn't even touched this repo for 2+ years before his tantrum, and he hadn't done anything significant since 2018 (and most of that was just regular maintenance and accepting PRs). Not to mention, while the package might have been quite useful and widely popular, it wasn't exactly rocket science. It was precisely the kind of highly-specific utility package that you make once and then have no real need to update ever again. Marak could've continued not touching the package for another 15 years and it would still have gotten millions of downloads a day.
And to top it off? He claimed the reason he did all this was because he thought he was getting ripped off, but he was getting sponsor money from some corpos that were paying back to the project to the tune of roughly $800 a month. I don't know about you, but I would be ecstatic to get $800 a month for doing what amounts to at most a single afternoon of routine maintenance once a year for half a decade. No, the real reason he did all this was because he was peeved that his subscription-based Faker.js cloud service wasn't selling, and he was looking for someone to blame (while possibly getting a quick buck in the process).
No one person is the judge in this community. The community is the judge. And the community has judged that Marak can take his preachy, self-righteous, and entitled attitude elsewhere. If he cared about being recognized for his work, he shouldn't have burned his projects to the ground and left them to rot. He's not entitled to, nor does he deserve, any attributions beyond what is strictly required by law.
https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/rwp0ab/author_of_fakerjs_deletes_the_entire_repo/
I'm trying to reveal the facts of what's happened with existing posts. And I try to figure out what I'm missed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/rz56qu/marak_adds_infinite_loop_to_colorsjs/
May I ask why color.js repo is still here? Is it recovered?
According to the commits history, this looks to be the original repo. So it means the author made this repo public again at some point.
What happened to the comments area of this commit of color.js
Sorry, it's so funny. I cannot stop laughing...
@tonyqus As you know, faker.js got forked and now basically has new owners and maintainers. However, colors.js hasn't been forked with new owners because there's not really any reason to. The repo is still here because it never went anywhere - it's simply been abandoned. (To my knowledge, Marak only deleted faker.js.)
As I said before, this is a utility library with nothing but constants and simple pure functions, so there is very little to maintain. 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 held the malicious code, so NPM scrubbed those versions from their registry, effectively reverting back to 1.4.0. They've also presumably revoked Marak's ability to push new versions so they cannot cause any more damage. This package has effectively been permanently pinned, so this repo's continued existence is basically just as a museum exhibit of open source history for the foreseeable future.
I'm not going to discuss the topic any further. I've said what needs to be said, and issue pages aren't chat rooms. In fact, I strongly recommend you close this issue. It's only because Marak has abandoned this repo that the issue hasn't already been closed for not being a valid issue, and I get the distinct feeling that if they do wander through at some point, they won't exactly be pleased to see us here.