https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190924/16482343062/dependencies-both-technological-human-display-story-developer-who-deleted-code-being-used-ice.shtml

Three years ago, we had a pretty fascinating story about how a developer, after getting an ambiguously threatening note from a company about how a bit of his code might violate the trademark of another company, deleted all of his code from NPM (Node Package Manager), a key repository for node.js code. One of the bits that the developer deleted (totally unrelated to the potential trademark dispute) was simple code that tons of websites relied on -- leading many of them to break in response. The story raised all sorts of interesting questions not just about trademark, but namespaces, who controls code, dependencies, and much more. Indeed, the story was so interesting to me that I (very loosely) used it as inspiration for a science fiction story I recently wrote that will be released very soon (more on that very soon as well!)

Having been thinking a lot about all of that lately thanks to the story I was working on, I was surprised to see a similar situation pop up last week, with slightly different issues. This one involved an IT automation company, Chef, that helps lots of organizations better manage the configuration of various physical and virtual servers. The story kicked off with some controversy as someone noticed that Chef had signed a contract with ICE. Lots of people got (reasonably) angry about this, following on a pattern that has been playing out in the tech sector over the last few years.