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by booter12 2950 days ago
I was wondering how far down I would have to scroll to find something like this.

The guy is a total political zealot who hates corporations and hates that npm had to become one. He presented this at the end of NodeConfEU17 and also took the opportunity to lecture us (in Ireland) for being too white and not being as "diverse" as he wanted us to be.

IIRC, more than 50% of the presenters were women which he says is the only reason he attended the last day to speak at us. Great.

Hearing him talk was like someone taking a shit on the floor after an otherwise wonderful conference. It makes me cringe that I have to use npm after hearing that guy talk. I am not even sure I will go to that conference again after that.

1 comments

Looks like his talk wasn't recorded[0]? He published the slides but they're sadly not very informative[1].

To be honest I can't believe the registry is still using CouchDB under the hood. It's not a good fit for the problem space.

I'm also not surprised he says this in his talk:

> Ultimately, I don’t like anyone else having control. If I’m going to give npm to a company, I want control of the company.

The npm registry and client should be controlled by a foundation for all the same reasons Node is. Yarn was a great step in that direction but it seems npm Inc is doubling down and based on how communication between the yarn maintainers and npm Inc went when they accidentally broke yarn[2][3], it feels like they're trying to fight yarn rather than cooperate.

I've seen npm Inc employees (including "community managers") attack people ("paying customers") on Twitter in response to criticism of how npm Inc runs their open source projects. They also don't seem to make any distinction between personal opinion and representing npm Inc, pretty much dot-com era startup "bro culture" but with different social politics.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0CdgOSSGlBaxNkrUIHrh...

[1]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9rx9aalvts60w5y/why-npm-inc.pdf?dl...

[2]: https://twitter.com/jamiebuilds/status/1000198463269699584

[3]: https://twitter.com/mikeal/status/1000164993667555328