An Investigation into Protestware

TL;DR

This paper analyzes protestware, a form of software used for activism, by collecting samples, identifying key characteristics, and assessing its community impact and trends, especially during recent geopolitical events.

Contribution

It provides a detailed characterization of protestware, highlighting its diverse nature, community effects, and increasing usage in JavaScript libraries, filling a knowledge gap.

Findings

Protestware has diverse protest-inducing features.

Disruptive protestware can harm downstream users.

Usage of protestware in JavaScript libraries is rising.

Abstract

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. The roots of protestware date back to the early days of computing. However, recent events in the Russo-Ukrainian war has sparked a new wave of protestware. While news and media are heavily reporting on individual protestware as they are discovered, the understanding of such software as a whole is severely limited. In particular, we do not have a detailed understanding of their characteristics and their impact on the community. To address this gap, we first collect 32 samples of protestware. Then, with these samples, we formulate characteristics of protestware using inductive analysis. In addition, we analyze the aftermath of the protestware which has 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 "nature of inducing protest" is diverse, ii) the "nature of targeting users" is discriminatory, and iii) the "nature of transparency" is not always respected; (2) disruptive protestware may cause 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.