On March 22, npm fired several members of the open source and community team for discussing workplace conditions and other labor organizing activities. As a result, core employee contributors to the npm cli were removed from the project, and others have left in solidarity or put their work on hold.
Multiple claims were filed with the NLRB on this matter. The NLRB has investigated and found sufficient evidence of validity to proceed. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 protects US employees' right to engage in discussions of workplace concerns without threat of retaliation -- and awareness of the importance of how we treat each other is something I valued so much in collaborating with the cli team. How can we work together if we aren't free to discuss what we need?
It's disappointing for all of us to find the work we were doing interrupted in this way. Our open source community deserves better. I hope at some point soon npm will choose to repair the damage it caused so that work can move forward again. Please remember this was not a choice the open source team made, but a result of the actions of the company's executives.
@aparajita @Zearin I don't want to fork the discussion, but I think important to underline this: Yarn is not a Facebook project. Yarn received contributions from Facebook (and a lot of other companies), but its governance is not and has never been dictated by Facebook (as evidenced by it having its own org on Github, and having been released without patents file long before it was FB's policies). Should they want a feature, they'd have to do the same as anyone else and convince us, core maintainers, that it's worth building and maintaining. Not only for them, but for our users at large.
In fact, since I left Facebook about two months ago the project has thrived without receiving one contribution from anyone working at Facebook. We've welcomed new people to the team, are drawing our own plans, and have complete liberty to steward the project as we see fit (not that it wasn't the case even when the core team was mostly coming from Facebook).
In short, please use npm, tink, pnpm, or whatever fits your business case, but I'd appreciate not to see my project unfairly qualified with terms like "Facebook-infested". Not when our volunteer team does its best every night, every week-end, with little to no funding. Thanks by advance 😊
(I don't think continuing discussing it here is a good idea, since there are more important topics I don't want to hijack, but feel free to ask me more on Twitter and/or Discord and I'll be happy to answer your questions)