Left-Pad (2024)

Summary

It's been 8 years since the the left-pad incident happened. It's been a good choice to avoid this subject for focusing on actual work. Also, silence is gold. But on the other hand, left-pad is seen as a notable event mentioned in books, so I'll share more info and thoughts about what exactly happened. In most of 2016, I spent almost every weekend camping in remote areas without any signal. If you're curious how I felt when making the decision to unpublish; it was a choice made during self-reflection in nature. Not driven by logic, anger, or greed. It was a decision guided by my heart. And it came from a simple principle: if NPM breaks its own rules to remove one of my packages, they should remove all of them. Not that I'm an inflexible "rules" person — quite the opposite. The spirit behind the rules matter more than the rules themselves to me. In a different context, we could be asking NPM to take down a package without owner's permission for a "good" reason. However, in this situation, a company like Kik Messenger was just posturing and exercising power over the open source community NPM was built on, sending threats such as "we'll bang on your door" and "take down your accounts". This is the context in which NPM went against the rules they wrote themselves, to serve something they deemed "higher" than the soul of their company and the community. I was not afraid of Kik's threats, but NPM was afraid of losing Kik. Many people oversimplify this event, framing it as "an angry man protested corporate interests". This narrative shows us three things; first, they didn't look at the dates of the emails. They don't understand the timeline. Second, they can't relate to standing your ground in a high pressure situation involving threats. And third, they haven't read Al-Ghazali yet, don't quite understand how (free) people make decisions. There was nothing sudden or unexpected for NPM. I asked NPM to remove my modules, waited their response. I didn't set any deadline; NPM ha...