According to the latest report, Marak, the author of the well-known open-source tool Faker.js, recently deliberately destroyed the open-source library on GitHub, emptied all the code of the project, and left endgame in the commit, and also wrote “What really happened with Aaron Swartz?” in the README.
Faker.js is a very popular Node.js tool library for development and debugging, which can generate a large amount of fake data in the browser and node.js for simulation testing. The project currently has nearly 2.5 million downloads per week. Marak has put a lot of effort into developing this project, which is heavily used by many commercial companies, yet developers get very little benefit from it.
Marak wrote in November 2020 asking companies that use Faker.js to pay him or he will no longer provide maintenance. Another library he developed, colors.js, was also affected, but it is currently in a normal state and has not been emptied. This library can add color to the javascript console and has 22.4 million downloads per week.
In a post on the overseas forum Reddit, someone wrote that Marak emptied the Faker.js repository because of personal financial difficulties and the abuse of open source projects by others. Although the code seems to be emptied, someone found that the real Faker.js repository was hidden by him and set to private. At present, the last version of Faker.js is still available for download, the version number is 6.6.6 (666 is the evil number representing the devil in the West).
Back in October 2020, Marak lost all his belongings and was close to penniless when his apartment caught fire. To this end, he had to publish his PayPal account online and ask netizens to donate to him. Marak said in the latest tweet that NPM has reverted to the previous version of the faker.js package. He has now suspended his GitHub account.
