Last week we reported that the popular JavaScript library Standard JS has started showing giant ad banners in the npm command-line interface.
However, this news wasn’t received well by developers and following the community’s negative reaction, npm has decided to ban terminal ads altogether.
Ahmad Nassri, CTO of npm, Inc. told ZDNet, “we’re making updates to our policies to be more explicit about the type of commercial content we do deem not acceptable.”
According to ZDNet, the new updated policies by npm will put a ban on the following:
The ads that were shown after installing Standard JS, were displayed by another npm package called Funding that was included in Standard’s codebase.
The developer behind both Standard JS and Funding is Feross Aboukhadijeh, a developer who is trying to find a sustainable model to support the funds for running the Standard project.
He was hoping that other JavaScript projects would follow the suit and integrate Funding into their codebase to gather funds for open-source development work.
However, this initiative received a huge backlash from the JavaScript community. Most of the criticism came from developers who were concerned that the ads will make their way into logs and make app debugging unnecessarily complicated.
Shortly after npm’s announced ban on terminal ads, Aboukhadijeh also said he is also killing the Funding library project.
