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Comment by el_programmador | Hacker News Reader

Forgive me for being a contrarian but I see nothing more than yet another Stallmanist rant in this?

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?

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My point was : node is just a web server and npm just a package manager. There was countless before, there will be countless after, we will continue to code with or without. I have worked with a few technologies and in a few industries and package management is always complicated. The nature of the package management tools are not that important.

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.

Minor note: it's not accurate to say that node is a web server. Web servers are frequently built with node but node is also used for CLIs, graphical applications, parsers, compilers, etc.

I see. Thanks for the clarification

> They keep whining that Roald Dahl is miserable and all despite inventing Node

I think you mean Ryan Dahl haha

I think it's less that npm is making money, but that they've taken VC money.

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?

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