And it is no fun when the manager of the company developing your proprietary framework decides to tank it because of a change in strategy or the competitor buys the company and stops development. Since you have no source code you are forced to do what the commercial interest of foreigners dictate.

That is far, far less likely than a package being abandoned. What happened to your project? What "commercial interest of foreigners" went under that doomed you so?

For example VB6 -> VB.dotnet

Ah, that's a great example!

I think some of your experiences can be explained by your citing NPM as representative of FOSS. Not that there's anything wrong with the astonishing breadth of functionality available in the NPM ecosystem, but stability isn't its strongest comparative suit. OTOH, Django, which was cited by the author, just doesn't have that kind of volatility in its base features.

> Not that there's anything wrong with the astonishing breadth of functionality available in the NPM ecosystem

There are at least two things wrong. One is those things is missing standard functionality (eg, leftpad), and the other is a failure to maintain appropriate hubris (eg, is_even).

I don't think those are criticisms of the repository, are they? They seem like criticisms of modern Javascript.

True. I should have been more clear because NPM =/= FOSS.