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Discussion on: How a developer broke the internet by un-publishing his package containing 11 lines of code

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leongeyer • Edited

As far as I understand, Fernando, he used the name Kik without knowing there was a company in US that registered the name. Actually, there are a lot of companies called Kik in the world !! That kind of short names are pursued by companies, and they registered it. This patenting existing names is quite a issue, worldwide. Azer is Turkish, that Kik is US (there are a Austrian, a German one, etc), Internet is international. Consider that a lot of names of packages are probably the name of some company on the world. And if a much bigger company with more lawyers wants the name Kik for another package, NPM will reassign them the name? We can be changing names of packets just because a company decided to adopt a name, it would be a never-ending mess. So, for me, declining such kind of request was the logical step to take, and fulfilling it was a failure from NPM. Maybe they had no option due to the laws of the country they are in, which shows that this is a problem to be solved: in laws and/or software structure.
And I understand perfectly the feelings of the developer: so many people working for OpenSource make the base of what is programming today, and if a company comes with a request, the choice of the developer is disregarded, undone, and even twice.
But well, yes, the point of this article is how code is build and related.