NPM is the gift that keeps on giving. Remember back when left-pad “broke the Internet“? This time, a package with two million weekly downloads started stealing cryptocurrency. As with the left-pad incident, it’s not NPM itself that was the problem, it just exposed a general problem: project maintainers don’t want to maintain their projects forever.

Dominic Tarr, the original developer of the event-stream package, started the project for fun. He got tired of maintaining it, someone offered to take it over, and he handed it off. It just turns out the new maintainer wanted to steal Bitcoin.

“You get literally nothing from maintaining a popular package,” Tarr wrote. In fact, the more popular your project becomes, the more it costs you. You have more expectations and responsibility put on you. Responsibility you didn’t ask for and probably don’t want. And all of that comes with no compensation. Paying maintainers is an obvious solution, but implementing that plan can be challenging. 

When someone doesn’t want to keep working on a project, they often hand it off to willing contributors who will take the lead. That works out most of the time, but sometimes it blows up spectacularly. I’m sure it happens in other ecosystems, too, but the “grab your dependencies as you go” nature of Node makes it really easy to bring this issues to light. I think we all owe NPM a big “thank you”.