<story><title>NPM staff fired after trying to unionize – complaints</title><url>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/22/npm_fired_staff_union_complaints/#</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>evv</author><text>All of the drama around the npm firings has sparked an interesting discussion in the JS community: does it even make sense to trust a for-profit corporation with the world&amp;#x27;s supply of JS?&lt;p&gt;One of the creators of unpkg.com is considering a fork of the registry: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;mjackson&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1119355707055165441&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;mjackson&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1119355707055165441&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, yarn (a popular alternative to the npm client), uses a proxy to NPM so they can change the default registry of all yarn clients, if they choose to.&lt;p&gt;As it stands, npm is the centralized source of truth for all our JS packages, and historical versions. We have no guarantees about the future of npm. Aside from a relatively clean history, we have no reason to trust them. For every dollar of VC money that they have taken, we have a reason to believe the registry won&amp;#x27;t last in its current form. This is scary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krapp</author><text>&amp;gt;does it even make sense to trust a for-profit corporation with the world&amp;#x27;s supply of JS?&lt;p&gt;No. Javascript, despite its flaws, was already one of the freest, easily accessible and deployable programming languages in existence. It flourished throughout the web without any gatekeepers or centralized authority, and it never &lt;i&gt;needed&lt;/i&gt; the ecosystem of overwrought complexity and BS that it has.&lt;p&gt;Not only does it not make sense for NPM to have de facto control over that language through a single, proprietary registry and a single package manager, it further makes no sense that in the intervening years, with all of the issues NPM has had, no serious attempt at competition or re-decentralization of the JS community has even been attempted.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I feel like the baby has long ago been thrown out with the bathwater, and NPM&amp;#x27;s ubiquity and network effect has made it &amp;quot;too big to fail,&amp;quot; despite failing constantly. Maybe we can just start over once NPM has finally burned to the ground and taken the web with it.</text></comment>
<story><title>NPM staff fired after trying to unionize – complaints</title><url>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/22/npm_fired_staff_union_complaints/#</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>evv</author><text>All of the drama around the npm firings has sparked an interesting discussion in the JS community: does it even make sense to trust a for-profit corporation with the world&amp;#x27;s supply of JS?&lt;p&gt;One of the creators of unpkg.com is considering a fork of the registry: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;mjackson&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1119355707055165441&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;mjackson&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1119355707055165441&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, yarn (a popular alternative to the npm client), uses a proxy to NPM so they can change the default registry of all yarn clients, if they choose to.&lt;p&gt;As it stands, npm is the centralized source of truth for all our JS packages, and historical versions. We have no guarantees about the future of npm. Aside from a relatively clean history, we have no reason to trust them. For every dollar of VC money that they have taken, we have a reason to believe the registry won&amp;#x27;t last in its current form. This is scary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bellerose</author><text>I always star the main packages I use on GitHub but I realize I&amp;#x27;m missing out on the required packages being used as well. It would be nice if an alternative sprung up that was p2p truly decentralized by developers and intertwined with where developers typically host their repositories.</text></comment>