The headline overstates the damage and blames the programmer. But the internet itself was never in jeopardy, just a bunch of sites that run on Javascript. And the cause of the disruption was not the programmer, but rather a company that took some open source the programmer contributed and transferred ownership to a Canadian instant messaging company. Azer Koçulu wrote a piece of code called kik and hosted it at a package managing company called NPM. A lawyer for the company called Kik contacted Koçulu and said "our trademark lawyers are going to be banging on your door and taking down your accounts and stuff like that." NPM responded by transferring ownership of the piece of code called kik to the company called Kik. Koçulu responded by removing the rest of his code from NPM. One piece of that code turned out to be vital to a number of Javascript libraries. From where I sit both Kik and NPM have a lot of answering to do. And I ask - again! - why it is that commercial enterprises seem to corrupt and ruin everything they touch?
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