Anyone can make a mirror. That's the glory of CouchDB. Just kick off replication and BOOM you've got the npm registry. There are community mirrors in Europe (http://npmjs.eu) and Australia.
If you want to run or use a community mirror that's totally great!
Charlie Robbins (CEO and Co-Founder of Nodejitsu) here. I think your thoughts are really poignant. I’d like to make clear that public availability is the absolute top-priority for us over here but we chose to make a couple of choices that other Public Cloud PaaS companies did not. These choices enable us to offer the truly best-of-breed hosting opportunity for Node.js developers:
1. Early on we recognized that we would not exist as a company if the node.js community was not successful. That is why we have built and maintain over 200 open-source modules on npm.
2. Infrastructure agnostic (that’s right, you get to choose where your servers live).
3. Multiple platforms (currently Ubuntu and SmartOS).
4. 100% node.js up and down the stack. This is all we do and I think we do it better than anyone else. We also have provisioning, monitoring, and configuration management tools similar to our jitsu CLI for enterprises.
5. Commitment to immediate support: If you have a problem, you have a problem now, not tomorrow, not 3-days from now. As such, we want to make sure we grew our support team to support increased on-boarding and support requests resulting from public availability.
6. Private cloud support: this is currently where most of our customers reside. We license them software that they run in their datacenter or self-managed IaaS account.
So rest assured we ramping up for a public release. Feel free to email me at charlie [at] nodejitsu [d0t] com if you’d like to talk more.
We (nodejitsu) sponsored NodeSummit, but have no control over nodesummit.com. I have reached out to Charles Beeler (the conference organizer) to make him aware of the issue.
How is this more extreme than asking friends to upvote stories? It is simply posting from a different account. I have 15 email accounts for various projects and companies; does that mean I'm a spammer?
Posting from a different account and up voting from multiple accounts are two completely different issues. We have never used fake accounts to artificially upvote anything. Period. Nothing provided suggests otherwise. On the subject of data, if the above is an attempt to justify the original decision it is insufficient.
* How were you able to infer that both accounts were in-fact represented by a single individual?
* When one considers it objectively, two accounts with the same IP Address posting comments to HN on the same thread from different accounts is not necessarily malicious. It simply could be two different computers on the same home or work network. Point in fact, Marak and I were roommates during the early days of Nodejitsu. How would you be able to infer the difference?
Full logs of all relevant messages / comments with dates and IP Addresses included are really the only thing that will be satisfactory, feel free to email me: [email protected].
I still do not see a pattern of malicious behavior or any malicious behavior at all. As I mentioned before, I am very happy to make this water under the bridge, but please stop making false claims in public without providing more than conjecture.
* Can you provide log files illustrating your arguments?
If the answer to either of the above is "no", then please keep your false claims to yourself. I'm happy to view this as water under the bridge, but I will not allow lies about my company, Nodejitsu, to circulate: we did not (and would never) use any kind of malicious, automated, or anti-competitive tactics to falsely generate upvotes for anything on *.nodejitsu.com
Again, if you'd like to speak with me personally I am available at [email protected].
Your claim that Nodejitsu "created an army of sockpuppets to vote up their posts" is outrageous. Let me enumerate the issue here:
1. Your moderators are simply unable (or unwilling) to distinguish "sockpuppets" from a legitimate community of developers (that is the node.js community). Yes, when we post something to HN we send out the link via Twitter and IM to colleagues in the node.js community who may potentially upvote it. This is natural "word of mouth". We have never used bots, or any kind of malicious automation to ensure posts reach the front-page.
2. There is no transparency for bans, nor is the ban every communicated to the owner of the HN account. If you think an account is unfairly trying to manipulate the voting system; you have to contact them. Anything less is blatantly ambiguous and unacceptable.
3. Given the silent nature of bans on HN, we have no choice but to move onto a new HN account and continue to submit legitimate posts using legitimate word of mouth dissemination. Perhaps you view this as "sockpuppets," but what other choice do we have?
4. In the particular case of Nodejitsu, this behavior is even more unacceptable. We are a platform-as-a-service where any user can create a publicly available application on a subdomain of nodejitsu.com. How can you ban the entire *.nodejitsu.com domain when we are not responsible for malicious actions (real or perceived) taken by a given user? This is not an admission that any such behavior has taken place; I'm sure that your claim is addressed in [1]-[3].
In the copyright world, site owners are protected by malicious actions of users through DMCA safe-harbor. In such senarios, the owner of the site will be contacted and the malicious behavior (real or perceived) can be addressed and/or removed. By silently banning posts and not communicating with members of the HN community about what you perceive as malicious behavior you are doing yourself a serious detriment. This has (and continues to) raise questions about the legitimacy of the content on HN as just a shill for YCombinator.
If you'd like to speak with me personally you can email [email protected]
The project had been internal for a year and as such is pretty mature technically, but has a nascent community. If you're thinking about running node.js in production definitely check it out!
If you read Marak's article and contrasted it to the original IBM article it would be pretty obvious that its all facts. The original author (no matter how closely relates to IBM he is) clearly didn't put enough time into researching his article. Thing he says are straight up wrong and claiming otherwise is foolish. The title is clearly HNO, but the content is all correct.