> 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's supply of JS?
Don't we do the same with other companies such as RedHat?
How open is NPM's infrastructure? Can it be forked?
> Don't we do the same with other companies such as RedHat?
Not really. While most major Linux distributions are managed by for-profit companies, there's enough of them to provide legitimate competition and something you can call an open market.
With NPM, there's yarn, but not really, since that's only the client. For all intents and purposes, distributing a Javascript library is only realistically possible through NPM right now.
Also, better comparisons are perl, python, ruby, etc. Many other languages have centralized package repositories, but they aren't controlled by a for-profit, venture-backed company.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that npm inc's model is a new way to develop and operate a language's repo sustainably. Python, for example, has struggled to get the resources to evolve theirs. I'm not sure npm's approach is working well in practice, though.
Don't we do the same with other companies such as RedHat?
How open is NPM's infrastructure? Can it be forked?