How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code - Quartz
▻http://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code
▻https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/13072.jpeg?quality=80&strip=all&w=400
A man in Oakland, California, disrupted web development around the world last week by deleting 11 lines of code.
The story of how 28-year-old Azer Koçulu briefly broke the internet shows how writing software for the web has become dependent on a patchwork of code that itself relies on the benevolence of fellow programmers. When that system breaks down, as it did last week, the consequences can be vast and unpredictable.
“I think I have the right of deleting all my stuff,” Koçulu wrote on March 20 in an email that was later made public.
And then he did it.
One of the open-source JavaScript packages Koçulu had written was kik, which helped programmers set up templates for their projects. It wasn’t widely known, but it shared a name with Kik, the messaging app based in Ontario, Canada. On March 11, Koçulu received an email from Bob Stratton, a patent and trademark agent who does contract work for Kik.
Stratton said Kik was preparing to release its own package and asked Koçulu if he could rename his. “Can we get you to rename your kik package?” Stratton wrote.
“Sorry, I’m building an open source project with that name,” Koçulu wrote back.
The conversation quickly escalated, with Stratton threatening legal action: “We don’t mean to be a dick about it, but it’s a registered trademark in most countries around the world and if you actually release an open source project called kik, our trademark lawyers are going to be banging on your door and taking down your accounts and stuff like that — and we’d have no choice but to do all that because you have to enforce trademarks or you lose them.”
“Hahah, you’re actually being a dick,” Koçulu replied. “So, fuck you. Don’t email me back.”
Stratton brought Kik’s request for the name to npm, again citing the company’s trademark and potential confusion. Isaac Schlueter, the chief executive of npm, agreed to turn the name over to the company.
To Koçulu, npm’s decision to transfer ownership of the kik package to Kik ran counter to the values of the community it serves. In his reply, Koçulu said he wanted all of the packages he had registered on npm taken down. “I don’t wanna be a part of NPM anymore,” he wrote. “If you don’t do it, let me know how do it quickly.”
Two days after Koçulu’s last email to npm, on March 22, JavaScript programmers around the world started receiving a strange error message when they tried to run their code. The issue was severe enough to keep some developers from updating apps and services that were already running on the web. The error spit out many lines, but one stood out:
npm ERR! 404 ’left-pad’ is not in the npm registry.
It meant that the code they were trying to run required a package called left-pad, but the npm registry didn’t have it.
Message de Azer Koçulu :
▻https://medium.com/@azerbike/i-ve-just-liberated-my-modules-9045c06be67c
▻http://left-pad.io
#code #internet #npm #kik #github #programmation