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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

Certainly his right; his project (though it has a very permissive license), his time. It sounds like he's tired of working on it, and he requires sponsorship to make it worthwhile. Let's say he doesn't, and the project is forked. This begs an interesting question: does he own the npm name? "faker" has mindshare, not just in JS; if he's unwilling to work on it, would it make sense for the NPM organization to reassign the name to whatever the active fork is?

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Kind of sets a horrible precedent by NPM no? Keep, maintaining your open source project or we use it for a different project. How many builds does that break the very next update? What about downstream codebase security?

Actually it looks like NPM has a process with some discretion here

https://www.npmjs.com/policies/disputes

Which corporation sponsoring the fork gets to be declared the active fork?

It seems simplest to keep his original version and whatever updates he feels like doing as his own thing, and if a corporation feels like forking the project to add some feature they can add their name to it. If others prefer that version they can switch to it.

It's reasonable given the people doing it are well versed in this stuff. He keeps doing what he's doing without being as annoyed, the project stays on trajectory, and individual users can switch if they feel like it to an alternative option.

He ought to keep the name, however there should be some way to keep track of the public forks via something that is github oriented. Maybe something in DHT like IPFS. It maybe something npm/yarn can work out.

Let's just use domain names?

ytld.org/youtube-dl

google.com/rust_icu

facebook.com/react

Don't have a domain name?

marak.github.io/faker

Not everything needs to be reinvented.

the whole point is the original author may not want to publish the forks on his domain. There ought to be independent 3rd party to keep track of the fork or a npm name that is not the author and not github (aka Microsoft).

Given that NPM hasn't done so before, I find it very unlikely they would do so now.

More likely, the fork would become "faker2" if they don't want to come up with a new name.

I'm not sure they haven't. Their dispute process even outlines this as a use case: "This process is an excellent way to: Adopt an "abandoned" package"

https://www.npmjs.com/policies/disputes

According to that document, they only take action after four weeks of no response from the original owner.

It doesn't say so explicitly, but to me it seems that a cordial "No" from the original author will probably be the end of it.

Similar on Github, how do you announce new forks and get people to come to you instead of opening issues which can be closed?

I've seen a few abandoned projects where the first issue is by someone announcing their fork and their willing to continue maintenance, merge PRs, etc. Not an ideal situation, but sometimes it proves helpful.

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