[_puk]

Yeah, I appreciate that, but if this becomes a general concern that npm can grant ownership to whoever it deems acceptable (even to the point of republishing existing versions), then could we start seeing e.g. WTFPL with npm exceptions style licence fragmentation.

The source could still be readily available to anyone to republish as they see fit, but only as a different name / version.

Not condoning it, just thinking that the original author surely has the right to do this if they plan ahead (judging by the npm backlash that has been building over a single entity holding all the keys some may be starting to think this way).

[lmm]

All open source licenses allow the licensee to republish your code - that's part of the definition. It's not going to trigger license fragmentation because any exceptions will make it not open source.

If you want to enforce that other people use different names for their forks, the usual way to do this is with trademarks - this is what e.g. mozilla and redhat do. Npm should respect your trademarks, and if someone else publishes a project under your trademarked name you can make npm take it down... which is exactly what originally happened here.