Yes, we are considering a variety of corporate and legal structures to make sure that the open source projects and community are taken care of in a sustainable way. There are many trade-offs involved, and we've just started.
I don't feel strongly (as some do) that non-profits guarantee benevolence. There are many evil non-profits (and many more incompetent ones!) which do harm to the world, and many capital-G Good for-profit companies. In many cases, a non-profit can easily become an empty hand-wavey thing. (And in that case, what's the real difference, except $800/year to the state of California?)
Of course, it has worked out well in some cases. Mozilla and WordPress are great examples of this sort of thing functioning really well to facilitate the interaction between a company and an open source community. But it is very early to even be worrying about such things.
In any event, even if we do create a non-profit, the first step is to create a Delaware C as a for-profit company to generate the money that can allow us to create new products, spin up new infrastructure when necessary, and employ people to run the thing. So that's what I'm up to these days. npm has gotten too big to be just some dude's hobby project :)
Thank you for mentioning B Corporations. If Isaac is trying to decide between a non-profit and a C Corp, then a B Corp could be the perfect compromise. And as I posted on another thread, there are examples of B Corps raising A rounds.
Obviously since I said that I believe that the ideal npm registry would not depend on any particular company or funding but rather be fully distributed and free.
So that is what I think the ideal is. But the reality is that the world runs on money, and I think you deserve to be filthy rich for creating such a great system that so many people are relying on. So if you create a business and charge for npm somehow, certainly I will pay money to support it. And I will advocate that everyone else sign up for paid services related to npm as well. I mean, I doubt its going to break the bank for people. The difference between a million people paying $0 for something and even a very small fee like $10 would be huge in terms of funding.
I think the trick is to come up with a service that people need/really want so as avoid people doing an end-around with some alternate completely free system that doesn't support npm development at all.
Sorry if I complained too much by the way. Its just easier to dream about grand architectural changes on the internet than to do my actual job, which I believe I will go back to now.
Most US companies incorporate in Delaware mostly because their courts and laws are business friendly. The filing fees are also cheaper than most states. See:
