1. Age: 43
In terms of programmers, the biggest thing to start 2022 is the fact that a famous open source project was deleted by the author himself.
This is how it happened:
A few days ago, users of the open source libraries faker.js and colors.js turned on their computers and were stunned.
When they discovered that their application was outputting garbled data, something even more shocking was to come from Marak Squires, the author of the two open source libraries.
Yes, you heard that right, Marak Squires took the initiative to delete the repositories – he deleted all the code from the two project repositories and added malicious code to both repositories. Thousands of developers crashed as a direct result of this move.
Faker.js can be used to create fake data for many different types of domains, including addresses, businesses, companies, dates, financials, images, random numbers, names, etc. This data can be used for development and testing.
Why open source god abandoned his painstaking efforts overnight, delete the matter? Is this a distortion of human nature or a collapse of morality?
Melon eaters, please continue to read.
2. The legend of the open Source god
Marak Squires can be summed up in one short sentence: How can one live without suffering?
Marak’s disappearance and the official closure of his Github account gave him instant attention after a remarkable experience.
2.1 Open source entrepreneurship star, the evangelist of Node.js
Twelve years ago, in 2010, Marak and his friends started a cloud service company. The company’s main business is node.js server hosting, both for individual developers and enterprise users.
You can see that Marak really had a vision, a superhuman vision.
He was rubbing his hands, confident in the company’s future, and Marak exclaimed with ambition:
JavaScript goes in, money comes out.
Of course, slogans don’t work. In the beginning, Marak and his friends worked 18 hours a day.
As a result of their efforts, Nodejitsu raised $750,000 in series A funding and was named one of the 25 Startups to watch in the New York area that year.
Until they were acquired by GoDaddy in 2015, they were still the top players in the PaaS industry and the seeds of the PaaS track.
However, temporary success does not mean eternal success. With the rise of Node.js, established cloud services companies are also eyeing the hot property.
Marak knew it was too much to fight and opted out.
2.2 The Madness of Genius — Building bombs at home
The next time Marak hits the public eye, it will be 2020.
On September 15 of that year, his rented apartment caught fire. After the fire was put out, Marak was arrested — on suspicion of making a bomb in his home.
The proof was that Marak’s rented apartment contained potassium nitrate, magnesium, sulfur, copper, aluminum, fuses, mixing cups, and books on military bombs. These materials are placed separately, but they can be combined to create a powerful explosive device.
After the incident, Marak, who is homeless, posted a plea on Twitter for donations. Many netizens who follow him because of open source software have generously helped him out of his temporary predicament.
2.3 Dilemma
In fact, Marak had more than 90 open source projects on Github before they were officially banned, the most popular of which were faker.js and color.js, which he later buried.
Many large companies use his library, but he is not paid as much.
The open source license Marak chose was an MIT license with very loose terms and high tolerance for propagation and replication. Whoever takes his code to commercial use will pay nothing.
He doesn’t get enough sponsorships from open source projects to cover his overhead. His life became more and more difficult.
In the issue, many enthusiastic netizens encouraged Marak and offered suggestions, such as: Follow Vue and open OpenCollective donation.
Of course, some netizens suggested that he revise the open source license agreement.
Never giving up, Marak developed FakerCloud, a fake data cloud service based on Faker.js that can generate fake data online.
However, as he tries to take the paymium route, the big companies have finally shed their camouflage and become ugly — Retool has developed a completely free tool that overlaps with Faker Cloud’s functionality. At the same time, Retool turned down Marak’s acquisition offer with arrogance and indifference.
In a Github post in November 2020, he said, half threatening, half begging:
With all due respect, I no longer want to use my free work to support Fortune 500 (and other small companies) as an opportunity to send me a six-figure annual contract or fork projects and get others involved.
He didn’t get what he wanted, of course, but he didn’t give up on his open source project — it was a simple love.
When the bell rings for 2022, the first sound of the New Year does not bring him joy.
Finally in that night, he made up his mind — I quit! The rest is history.
So far, Marak released the latest commit of faker.js on January 4, blocked on January 6, and pushed the Liberty version of colors.js on January 7. However, judging from the update logs of faker.js and colors.js, it appears that his account has been unblocked. It is unclear whether Marak’s account has been suspended again.
3. Open source or monopoly
3.1 Opinions vary
In view of this deleted library run away incident, the network is different.
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“Removing your code from GitHub violates their terms of service? WTF? This is kidnapping.
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“Don’t know what happened, but I host all my projects on GitLab private Instance and never trust any Internet service provider.”
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Some netizens think faker. Js team’s response has been exaggerated, and said: “no one would use a generated only a few false data packet money. Faker. Js indeed save some time for developers to generate pseudo data, but we allow interns to write a similar program to generate data. It is not so important for the enterprise.”
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Some even suggested that Marak’s behavior was impulsive and irrational, and that Marak needed to learn to control his emotions in connection with his previous “sell the house and buy NFT” rumors.
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“It is his right to stop maintaining his project or delete it completely, but it is not right to intentionally submit harmful code,” Marak said.
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Of course, some people complain about the treatment of open source software (FOSS) developers: “It is expected that FOSS developers will be funded by relevant foundations”, and the reliability and stability of software is also crucial
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Some people say that some big companies do not respect the copyright of open source projects, and abusing open source projects is absolutely unfair to FOSS developers. However, Marak’s approach to faker.js is not desirable, not a positive example, there are personal negative reasons for Marak.
3.2 bystanders
In fact, as a bystander, I can only say that the world is good, poor is alone.
If an individual or company uses an open source project, do your bit for the open source community by buying them a cup of coffee or paying them a fee. Because helping open source authors is also helping yourself. Open source authors are able to contribute to the community in a steady and continuous manner.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with white piao, because he chose that open source agreement.
As far as I am concerned, sometimes I will reward the articles or videos I like, and the coins in STATION B will be cleared every day. I just want to do something for my favorite little up hosts.
I’m certainly not going to expostulate on moral grounds, it’s not going to help — just hope that in the programmer community, beyond the cold zeros and ones, there’s a warm glow of goodwill. He who loves, is always loved.
As a litigant and open source, Marak chose the unfortunate path. When he pressed the delete button, he also sent his future to the shredder.
He will be labeled untrustworthy and will be viewed with suspicion and scrutiny whether he takes a job, starts a new business or continues to work in the open source community.
Let me add a few points about Marak’s experience.
Former neighbors said Marak Squires was often a loner, rarely interacting with neighbors and kept the curtains drawn at home. He broke down on the way to the hospital after the fire in 2020.
In 2018, Marak Squires was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend, breaking her arm while trying to grab her phone. He had a five-year-old daughter at the time, but “he and the girl’s mother are separated”.
So Marak has some problems psychologically and in her family relationship. Between the open source work he was proud of and loved, and the desperate circumstances of financial hardship and family discord, he collapsed, triggering the collapse of many developers.
Just someone else’s crash to change the library line, his crash is dark.
3.3 Open source or monopoly
Around 1999 is the first jump in the Internet era, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, NetEase, Ctrip, Shanda, jingdong were almost all born in this period.
1999 was the craziest year in the history of The Internet in China. Almost all product forms in China for the next 20 years sprouted in this year, just like the rapid development of traditional industries in 1984.
Around 2010, China’s Internet made the second leap. Meituan, Didi, Toutiao, Xiaomi, Kuaishou, Bzhan and Momo all rode the boom of mobile Internet onto the historical stage.
Compared with ten years ago, twenty years ago, the Internet industry is no longer an emerging industry, it has shown the characteristics of closed and monopoly.
When you open your phone, you will find that the territory of daily life, video and entertainment has been carved up by several giants. No matter which popular app you use, almost all of them have their shadow.
Open source is undeniably good, and without it, there would not be enough individual developers and startups to thrive on it.
But the era of the Internet has changed, it is no longer a pattern of flowers blooming, but a monopoly situation of high cities and deep pools, it has gone from the Spring and Autumn states to the seven warring States.
Open source today is all about big companies unilaterally looting open source authors.
Vue.js uses Patreon and OpenCollective to accept donations from companies and individuals, and can raise $250,000 a year to keep its core team afloat.
The Eslint team also raises $150,000 a year through OpenCollective.
These great open source projects have created so much value for the JS space that they have indirectly made amazing fortunes for the big companies, and they deserve to make millions.
Open source is great for big companies and the industry as a whole, but it may not be so lucky for open source authors. When a developer chooses “knowledge for the public”, he chooses “value”, not “price”.
Especially the MIT open Source license, which means the open source authors give up the right to a piece of the cake. Of course, some open source authors have chosen the MIT protocol for their own reasons, perhaps because they want to expand their popularity.
Open source can be open source not only for individuals, but also for companies. Typical examples are Google’s opening of Android system and Tesla’s opening of electric technology.
These seemingly big pattern behind the move is actually the company in the interests of consideration. Of course, what is the first goal of the business? Monetization. There is no fault in that.
However, as a company, they have a certain ability to protect their rights and interests and maintain their basic plate. They are not afraid of public attention, but fear that no one will use it, because this is an opportunity for them to set industry standards.
Open source in their hands is like a nice monopoly weapon, they directly use open source to destroy a track, let all the small and medium companies on the track not open source out of business, and then occupy the market themselves.
The Domestic Internet industry has experienced many subsidy wars, such as the war between Ele. me and Meituan, and the competition between various groups to buy food. Their ultimate goal is to eliminate their competitors through subsidies, monopolize the market and control the right to speak.
In fact, the open source strategy of big companies is to achieve a real monopoly by not monopolizing the way, but the smoke of the open source war is far less pungent than the subsidy war, eye-catching.
So for big companies, open source is really sweet!
Open source, it can hog the track and set standards; Individuals open source, and it can still reap the fruits.
3.4 conclusion
As individual developers, open source allows us to avoid endlessly building wheels and enjoy the benefits of capable open source companies and good open source authors. However, because of the power of open source, easy-to-use frameworks are constantly emerging, and the barriers to entry for programmers are greatly reduced.
This point the author is also eating milk on the mouth, natural scold not out. Especially the front end, vue.js came out of the blue and supported many front end engineers.
However, open source is like a “flood of monsters” can not be contained, it brings new technology is endless, you want to catch up? Most people can’t catch up, only to watch the tide on the crest of the wind.
The only change is the same. All we can do is embrace it, be open to learning, to improving, and to making every choice to the best of our ability.
But if you were Marak Squires, what would you choose?
Refer to the link
- Deleted database run away big god’s life: was arrested for making bombs at home, now sell the house bet NFT, was the star of open source entrepreneurship
- Faker.js author: Either you pay or you take
- China’s Internet changes in 25 years: Two leaps, four waves and one bet on the future
- 28000 Star! The artifact that generates fake content: faker.js
- Does open source make programmers better or worse off in the age of monopoly?