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Comment by swang | Hacker News Reader

Was that lawyer overreaching? I don't know. But for this guy to expect npm to use their resources to defend him (which they may even possibly lose!) and get mad at them is... a bit presumptuous? Github isn't open source either so is he going to get mad when the lawyers send them an email about kik?

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If the kik in question is kik.com then

>Are you a developer? Kik has open-sourced tools and libraries to help you create great web experiences that can be discovered and instantly shared by Kik's 240 million users.

Rather sounds like a valid use of the law, not necessarily nice but valid. They are in the same space, open source web development.

Also, they've been around for several years, versus this guy's "kik" project which was created in late October 2015.

It seems like a legitimate complaint, IMO.

It's so easy to avoid name collisions that it doesn't even make much sense to think about it. And trademarks aren't even a feature of the capitalism he so seems to hate: OSS uses names for the same marketing purpose as companies do and larger projects register those trademarks.

NPM Inc like to pretend NPM is infrastructure so they should act like infrastructure. Reinstating the unpublished version of the unpublished module was okay. Taking down a package over an unclear trademark dispute without also informing the author and the public about their reasoning was not.

For all we know the claim may have been invalid and npm just doesn't want to risk legal expenses but because they made the decision in private we won't know until they release the prepared statement.

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