The developer of a popular JavaScript component hosted on the npm repository decided to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by adding code to his own component that would add or delete files on people’s computers in a way they didn’t expect. The component, called node-ipc, is a dependency for a variety of other projects, which had to issue emergency updates to stop the undesired behavior they unwittingly inherited.
It’s the second time something like this has happened this year in the Nodejs community, and some people have started referring to such acts of self-sabotage by developers as protestware. Experts believe that while developers certainly have the right to modify their own software, such acts risk damaging trust in the open-source ecosystem, which has faced increased supply-chain security challenges in recent years.
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