Marak, the creator of the well-known tool library Faker.js, was recently found to have emptied all the code in the project repository, and wrote "endgame" in the commit message, and also wrote in the README: "What really happened with Aaron Swartz?"
Faker.js is a very popular Node.js tool library that provides various types of simulated data for development and debugging. Marak has put a lot of effort and time into maintaining the Faker.js project, which is said to cover almost any use case a developer needs.
Because Faker.js uses the very permissive MIT open source license, many commercial companies don't pay anything to use the project - commonly known as "white prostitution". Marak wrote in November 2020 asking companies that use the Faker.js project to pay him, otherwise they would fork the project and maintain it themselves, because he no longer intends to work for anyone for free.
The reason Marak needed the money so badly came a month after a fire broke out in his apartment, which left him penniless and almost homeless.
A popular post on reddit also stated that Marak emptied the code from the Faker.js repository due to lack of funding and misuse of the open source project by others. It was discovered that the Faker.js repository with the deleted code was not the real Faker.js repository either. It is said that Marak first made the real Faker.js repository private and changed the name for it. Then create a new "Faker.js" repository with the same name - so the commit information of the repository only has the latest record, and the number of stars is far less than the original Faker.js repository.
Although Marak emptied the code of the Faker.js project repository, its packages on npm still retain historical version downloads. In addition, it can be seen that the latest version number of Faker.js is set to the evil 6.6.6, and the weekly download of the project has exceeded 2 million.
Marak's latest tweet states that NPM has reverted to the previous version of the faker.js package, and GitHub has suspended his access to all his public and private projects.
References
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210704022108/https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/issues/1046 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/rz5rul/marak_creator_of_fakerjs_who_recently_deleted_the/ [3] https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker [4] https://twitter.com/marak/status/1479200803948830724
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