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Comment by IggleSniggle | Hacker News Reader

Please. It looks like he was doing dev as a hobby, asked a big company how to handle removing his packages, and did what they told him to. They might not have had the right policy, but that doesn't make a guy who doesn't want to give his packages away to a company just because they're making threats into an asshole. It makes him typical.

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He had already given everyone a license to use his software. That’s what FOSS software is - the users are granted a license to use the software and it can’t be revoked, even if the author is throwing a tantrum.

Sure, but that license doesn't include the requirement to host in perpetuity, and anyway, I wouldn't expect a hobbyist to need to worry about this. If I decide to make my gamer-profile private / offline or something and that breaks your crawler, even though I previously granted unrestricted public access to that data, that's really not my problem.

Let’s not pretend he was hosting the software. Npm was.

No software developer or organisation will use a software repository that allows deletion of packages. That’s why it’s not a thing anymore.

If you think this “right” should exist, that’s a market niche for you to exploit. But you won’t, will you? Because like I said, no user wants this.

??? I didn't say anybody using npm wants this. I'm saying npm had the wrong policy around deletion, that npm could have handled the situation differently, and also that Azer not knowing or caring about the effects of removing the package doesn't make him an asshole or even negligent (although it also doesn't mean he ISNT an asshole; that's a separate matter).

The point is that Azer didn't owe anybody anything; not even to know what he was doing. npm did.

That said, I'm glad the wake-up call came in such a relatively benign way.

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