The author published the packages to a public registry with the expectation that the code would be run by others, it was not just a random github project, it literally invited others to run the code by being registered on npm.
The author explicitely offered no warranty on the code, but distributing malware is both illegal and against npm ToS.
Being an open source developer does not put you above ethics.
The only thing that would change this would be if some third party was mirroring their code on npm without the author consent.
The colors library has an infinite loop and you shipped that version to your end users? That's on you. Test and pin your dependencies. Not doing so is the true offense. Be upset with AWS and the likes who will run unvetted third party code on your machine.
Also note that an infinite loop is not malware. Implying such is insane. Are you now going to call every piece of crashing software malware?
Completely agree.
But the key concept that keep avoing is malicious intent.
Let's make an analogy in a completely different topic: Are (D)DoS attacks wrong? do people owe us not to (D)Dos our machines?
On one hand we connected our machines to the internet and declared ourself as ready to accept incoming traffic; on the other hand spinning up a bot army to render said machines unsusable is not nice.
Is it correct to say that you should have some kind of (D)DoS pretection on your services? yes. Is it also correct to say that people should refrain from crapping on other people stuff? also yes.
Getting back on topic; there is possibly a solid case to argue that this was not criminal (as no unauthorized "access" happened) but as much as open source volunteers should be more appreciated the "don't intentionally damage stuff with the SOLE intent of damaging stuff" is something expected of any human regardless of their social position.
Yes, if you attack infrastructure that you do not have permission to test. Here people downloaded code, ran it on their own infrastructure (or worse: shipped it to their users!) and were surprised this code did not do what they expected.
So, the only malicious actors here are those who shipped the package to their end users. Not the developer, they did not ship the code to anyone. They simply released a new version that other people chose to download and include in their own work.
To be clear, it's a total dick move and I don't support it at all, but the real blame should go to those who blindly download such code and run or redistribute it.
We need better tools to prevent things like this from happening again because nobody is ever going to audit the 2000 dependencies of every new create-react-app release.
I believe this is akin to not driving dangerously on the road. There is obviously a social contract. This what living in a society is all about. Just because someone can do something doesn't mean we can't expect otherwise.
His work benefited from the work of many other people who also released open source software. That not only includes the packages that he released, of which he had other contributors, some of which actually wrote more of the package than he did (colors.js) as well as packages that he more or less did a direct port from (faker.rb and CPAN::faker). He also benefited from the entire npm/node ecosystem.
People have every right to be pissed.