Thousands of open-source works have been bricked due to two open-source libraries available on the GitHub repository being maliciously altered by their author. According to the author, he did it so he no longer wants to publish free software for commercial enterprises that make millions of dollars.

His action prompted a big online debate, with GitHub’s answer eliciting a completely different response. “Faker” and “colors” are the names of the two libraries in dispute. Colors has over 20 million weekly downloads on npm alone, with over 19,000 projects depending on it. Faker, on the other hand, receives 2.8 million downloads every week and supports over 2,500 applications on the same platform.

Applications employing these two libraries began producing messages like “LIBERTY LIBERTY LIBERTY”, as well as non-ASCII nonsense, early last week. “It’s come to our knowledge that there is a zalgo bug in the 1.4.44-liberty-2 release of colors.” “Please know that we are working to resolve the matter right now and will have a resolution soon,” the creator, who goes by the nickname Marak on GitHub, wrote in a satirical update.

Zalgo is characterized as digital writing that has been altered to appear spooky or glitchy and was first utilized on anonymous forums in terrifying and disturbing stories. He appears to have a problem with large firms adopting his free code without contributing to it.

“Respectfully, I will no longer do free work to Fortune 500 corporations (or other smaller businesses).” In late 2020, the developer stated, “There isn’t much else to say.” “Use this as an opportunity to offer me a six-figure annual contract or fork the project and assign it to someone else.”

His most recent decision provoked a heated debate on the internet. While some people appear to approve of his act of defiance against big business, others are less happy, claiming that his actions are reckless and that if he doesn’t want his code to be utilized, he should cease freely distributing it.

GitHub retaliated by kicking the author from the platform, causing further more controversy. While some believe that such acts must have consequences, others have begun pushing for the decentralization of the service as a way of protecting developers against unilateral measures.