Generally, open source projects are used by millions of users who belong to a very supportive community. One of the main websites or platforms we found to share this code is GitHub.
But not everything is good news in this regard, since over the last few hours the open source project service has become chaotic. This has been mainly due to the errors detected in the work of a certain well-known developer on the platform. Specifically we are referring to the developer known as Marak, who has apparently been modifying and corrupting some of his libraries. These to which we refer are the so-called Colors and Faker , quite popular and used, by the way.
The problem of all this that we will tell you is mainly due to the widespread use of the two mentioned libraries. Therefore, and as you can imagine, this modification of the pieces of software could affect the projects of millions of users, causing a Matrix effect in elements such as Windows PowerShell or the Linux Terminal . It is worth mentioning that initially these modifications were made by the developer as a complaint. Marak, after the events, wanted to make it clear that he does not want to continue working for free for large companies.
We must not forget that despite being focused on open source projects from users around the world, GitHub is owned by Microsoft . In short, this content creator has damaged two of its own libraries published on the platform to protest their free use by large companies .
Issues on GitHub stemming from two important libraries
It must be taken into account that the errors and the projects that used these two libraries have been occurring over the last few days. To give us an idea of the importance of all this, we will mention that, for example, Colors currently has more than 20 million downloads . This can give us a rough idea of the huge number of bugs resulting from this modification.
One of the main failures detected in recent days due to this erroneous modification was the printing of inconsistent data . At first it was thought that all this was given by the default package management system for Node.js. But later and after Marak’s statements, those affected realized that the errors in their projects were due to the intentional and erroneous change in these libraries .
It is noteworthy that these modified versions cause the affected projects to print strange letters and symbols. This goes on forever, and it all starts with three lines of text: “LIBERTY LIBERTY LIBERTY.” At the same time we must know that after the events that we have described, GitHub has blocked access to all its projects to the developer Marak. Moreover, in the last few hours the platform itself has eliminated more than 100 repositories owned by Marak. Obviously this is a movement on the part of the Microsoft platform that the aforementioned user has also denounced.
Right now while Colors has been fixed, Faker is still causing problems for now. Therefore, in this second case, the best thing we can do is install a previous version.