There was a threat of a lawsuit. npm's lawyers decided that this threat was not frivolous.

How do you know what they thought? It seems just as likely to me that they didn't see much merit in the complaint, but didn't think it was worth fighting since IP law is such a mess in the US that even clearly baseless complaints can drag on and become expensive.

Because npm stated it publicly on Twitter.

Huh, really? That's strange. I just checked both @npmjs and @izs and don't see any comment on the merits of the complaint now.

Further comment: turns out that npm lied about this. So I'm just straight-up wrong.

Thanks for the followup. Hopefully this moves on to better places.

I follow a _lot_ of their employees on twitter, and by now, I don't remember which one had the best tweet about it tbh.