Ceej and company are trying to portray NPM as the villain here, but is the entire JS ecosystem's burden their's to carry? They keep whining that Roald Dahl is miserable and all despite inventing Node and why the NPM founder is so rich with VC money, etc. According to me, therein lies their hypocracy:
On one hand, you declare your altruism and how you care about commons and not money but on the other hand, you try to imply guilt on those who try to earn money out of JS ecosystem! How is this fair? You do your job and let them do theirs, I don't see how NPM is made the villain here?
The passion that this kind of topic seems to unleash looks like the consequence of a terrible fear a loosing control over an irreplaceable tool. But no tool is irreplaceable : if you can't/don't want to(for political reasons) use node, npm or even javascript just use something else.
That just it. I have no opinion about who makes money from what. At least, not in this thread.
I think you mean Ryan Dahl haha
Venture capitalists don't care about the community, or the fact that they're funding critical infrastructure.
They care about extracting rents in order to get back 100x what they put in.
Do you not see the blindingly obvious problem here?
If npm stops being the go-to solution, another one will take its place, naturaly adopted by the community, following the path of least resistance. Centralized or not. It does not really matter. What does matter is the code that's being downloaded. Modules dependencies management is an old problem, countless of tools have tackled.
Is the node and front projects architectures that dependent on npm ? It's a little coupled but not that coupled ? The dependency management still require a little brain power from dev teams, or does it really fully relie on the package managers ?