On the Characteristics and Impacts of Protestware Libraries

Protests are public expressions of personal or collective discontent with the current state of affairs. Although traditional protests involve in-person events, the ubiquity of computers and software opened up a new avenue for activism: protestware. While news and media heavily report individual protestware as discovered, an in-depth understanding of how they impact the open-source software supply chain is largely missing. In particular, we do not have a detailed understanding of their characteristics and impact on the open-source community who rely on free contributions. To address this gap, we first collect 163 samples of libraries that are either modified (protestware) or created (which we call protestware enablers ) with a clear intention to protest. In addition, we analyze the aftermath of the protestware, which has the potential to affect the software supply chain in terms of community sentiment and usage. We report that: (1) protestware has three notable characteristics, namely, i) the way protests are induced is diverse, ii) the altered functionality can be discriminatory, and iii) the transparency ( i.e. reporting the change for protest) is not always respected; (2) disruptive protestware may cause a substantial adverse impact on downstream users; (3) developers of protestware may not shift their beliefs even with pushback; (4) the usage of protestware from JavaScript libraries has been seen to generally increase over time. [Content Warning: This paper contains aggressive and derogatory language in the form of examples from GitHub user comments, which some might find unsettling.]