A few weeks ago a patent lawyer sent me an e-mail asking me to unpublish “kik” module from NPM. My answer was “no” and he replied me saying “I don’t wanna be dick about it, but “kik” is our registered brand and our lawyers gonna be banging on your door, and taking down your accounts.”
When I started coding Kik, didn’t know there is a company with same name. And I didn’t want to let a company force me to change the name of it. After I refused them, they reached NPM’s support emphasizing their lawyer power in every single e-mail CC’ing me. @izs accepted to change the ownership of this module, without my permission.
This situation made me realize that NPM is someone’s private land where corporate is more powerful than the people, and I do open source because, Power To The People.
Summary; NPM is no longer a place that I’ll share my open source work at, so, I’ve just unpublished all my modules.
This is not a knee-jerk action. I love open source and believe that open source community will eventually create a truly free alternative for NPM.
I’m apologize from you if your stuff just got broken due to this. You can either point your dependency to repo directly (azer/dependency) or if you volunteer to take ownership of any module in my Github, I’ll happily transfer the ownership.
Cheers.