Post

npm increasingly feels like a zombie org under GitHub. As someone who's been around the JS ecosystem and part of multiple OSS orgs for years, what I'm seeing isn't just "big co moves slow." It's quiet neglect of critical infrastructure the entire JS world runs on. A short thread 🧵

One concrete example. This issue on npm/cli: github.com/npm/cli/issues/8768 Open for six months. Zero official replies. It's not an outlier, it's the pattern. Real users posting real bug reports, just sitting there with no response from anyone at npm.

The npm registry has no proper issue tracker. Feedback gets dumped into a GitHub Discussions space, mixed with everything else, rarely getting an official reply. npm is critical infra for millions of developers. It deserves its own dedicated, staffed, public tracker. This isn't optional.

Then there are the recent security incidents. Supply chain attacks keep landing on npm, and the responses tend to be slow and opaque. When you operate the registry the world depends on, "we're looking into it" days later isn't accountability. It's risk externalized onto the ecosystem.

So here's the ask: **open source the npm registry** Microsoft acquired npm in 2020. The bar isn't even "make it better." It's "stop making it worse." A closed registry controlled by one company is a structural risk the JS ecosystem shouldn't have to carry.

It's not only about open sourcing the code. Hosting the npm registry is probably quite expensive too. IMO long term the solution is probably joining the OpenJS foundation.

Agreed, just open sourcing the code isn't the answer on its own. The way I see it, open sourcing isn't really about the code being public. It's about activating a community. The community is the point. The repo is just the entry door.

That's what issues, PRs and discussions actually mean. When you hit a bug, you can submit a PR and fix it yourself, instead of waiting in the dark for some unknown release date. Right now, the npm feedback loop is broken. You report, you wait, you give up.