# The economics of package management
I’m going to tell you a story about who owns the JavaScript language commons, how we got here, and why we need to change it. It’s a story about money as much as it is about Javascript— money and ownership and control.
I'm going to tell you the version of the story I know how to tell. I'm one human with imperfect knowledge and a point of view, so the story is not the only story anybody could tell about it, not by a long way. But I can tell you a good version of one slice of this story, because I was part of it. I was at its heart, because until last year I was CTO of npm Inc, the company that runs the Javascript package registry. This gives me an expertise on the topic that few people in the world have. It also comes along with a point of view, which I invite you to keep in mind as you listen to this story.
_You_ are part of this story about Javascript package management. I bet you didn’t know that. By the time I'm done with this story, you'll know why you're part of it, and why that matters.
This is a story about money, and people who have money, and how the people who make money from open source software are mostly not the people who write it. It's a story of an accidental decision that you made without knowing about it, and one that I made consciously, and how that decision worked out today. It’s a story about ownership, control, and their consequences.
It’s also a story about power—who has it, how much of it you have, and what we can do with it.
You ready? Here we go.
Our story starts with the late Yahoo back in its glory days, the mid-2000s. Yahoo was the heart of a lot of Javascript activity back then. It employed a lot of Javascript thought leaders, like Douglas Crockford, and it was pushing the state of the art forward. It might not have had a good business plan, but it had a good tech stack.
One thing Yahoo had in its tech stack was a package manager, called ypm, that apparently did some neat things.
Javascript was starting to be very interesting as a programming language, around then thanks to jquery and modern browsers adhering to a spec. Server-side Javascript was a hot topic, and there were several projects in motion attempting to make that happen.
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