If that happens too much, corporations re-evaluate rush and costs and start developing things in isolation and in-house. But I expect leftpad will be a rare event.
If we follow the rules, the people that went malicious are all the trusted users and package repository that broke his intent. He was totally in the limits of his rights and the social contract of the licencing for FOSS.
The fact we present these maintainers as "going malicious" is exactly what i am ranting against in this post.
I'd argue that he very much did break the social contract. Not the letter of the actual contract, but it's generally assumed FOSS developers aren't in it to screw consumers of their offerings actively. That's the social contract that's the lifeblood of the movement, and if it breaks in the general case, the movement dies.
(There's a lot of things people can do that they're perfectly entitled to that would destroy ecosystems because they shatter expectations. Linus could sneak a very clever backdoor into Linux [hypothetically, perhaps not without collusion with multiple actors and a lot of prep work], and he wouldn't break the license but he would severely injure the project's reputation).
Good luck with that… your company has the skills to reimplement node?
> but it's generally assumed FOSS developers aren't in it to screw consumers of their offerings actively
It's generally assumed they are in it to get screwed actively… but often that isn't the case.
> Linus could sneak a very clever backdoor into Linux
You are aware of a difference between writing a malware and deleting a project you own right?
You are quite correct; the npm ecosystem may be a special cade since it has been built on a huge amount of trust-assumption, and the real issue there was that trust model, not FOSS in general. Still, in that ecosystem, unpublishing a module unilaterally that so many systems relied upon was, at besst, negligent (morally not legally), showing a disregard for the concerns of those outside the fight with npm operators. In that context, the unpublish was more malicious than an adherence to the old "user beware" rule. Indeed, it would be hard for Linus to unpublish Linux, given the distributed nature of its hosting; unpublishing leftpad looks more like taking advantage of a mis-design in npm's package model to screw over thousands of third-parties.
The leftpad stunt hurt everyone in that ecosystem. It was dropping a stink bomb at a party because the host had offended him, but everyone in the room got to suffer the consequences.
Noone built it as trust-assumption
We all chose to trust because it allows us to look at ourselves in the mirror every morning and forget the free work we are exploiting. The problem is us. Not npm.
That's good! It's also necessary to operate at this scale, where any of us (not just corporations, but every hacker using a package manager) can operate with some minimum level of expectation that while packages might break from time to time, the breakage isn't malicious and everyone's incentives are aligned to minimize it and correct issues as quickly as found. Imagine what the ecosystem would look like if we couldn't make that assumption? The legal warranty allows for, say, Debian to start sneaking keyboard harvesters into the binary blobs that they publish alongside the source... What would happen to Debian users if they did? What would happen to the entire GNU/Linux desktop ecosystem if every package manager chose to do that?
If that trust were to break at scale (i.e. if stunts like leftpad's removal breaking everyone became common, or FOSS developers were to begin doing even more malicious things that the "as-is" legal providing technically allows)... We'd all do fewer cool and useful things, and companies with money would do more of them out of sight.
I don't think that's an improvement over what we have now.
So yes, the buck has always stopped with the last mile developer putting other people's software together into a solution. That is a necessary requirement to have an open source ecosystem at all in a legal environment that demands that blame be assignable somewhere. But if we all start acting like that legal constraint is the only behavioral constraint that matters, we don't actually get to have an open source ecosystem.
Which is why I only use licenses from FSF: I want cool stuff I can use… I don't want my cool stuff to be used in cool stuff I can't use, or is used against me.
Anyway not inserting malware is not the same as "this is no longer maintained so I remove it to not be bugged about issues"
Which only works for products, not component libraries.
Well, yes.
There must always be someone you can drag onto the carpet (i.e., sue if it fails or goes rogue). Proprietary software gave you that, at least at the enterprise level. When Microsoft, IBM, et al. sold you software they were staking their professional reputation on that software and the associated support.
So yes, let's go back to proprietary -- when developers got paid and businesses got some assurance from the vendor that their stack wouldn't go rogue on them.
You could consider this a weakness in npm's design... Most package managers don't have the decentralization of authority that npm does. But if it is weakness in the design, it's a weakness that the leftpad author chose to exploit.
This software is provided 'as is'