Cloudflare Package Repository Mirrors

Cloudflare Package Repository Mirrors
cloudflaremirrors.com

It's not like letting them gather logs on my computers updating would be terrible somehow, but if it's so easy to avoid donating more logs and more dependence on them, why not do it for the sake of preserving diversity?

Growing companies often exhibit a long term pattern that usually seems innocent at first manifestation:

- Offer something for free

- Become hugely popular at offering that free thing

- Alternatives slowly dwindle in popularity and/or begin to die off

- User 'choice' increasingly becomes concentrated in that single option

- Company introduces surprising policy change, but users can switch to an alternative if they don't like it

- Company introduces differentiating functionality setting its option apart from the alternatives.

- Users grow additional dependence on the new functionality, alternatives look increasingly obsolete

- Company becomes increasingly aggressive at introducing changes, as they now own the primary alternative

It's hard to imagine CloudFlare are somehow going to monopolize package management :) But nonetheless, free services like this generally signal the beginning of this pattern

At some point I'm sure e.g. DejaNews seemed like an innocent dependency, and that attempting to look far ahead into the future would not have revealed its eventual sale to Google and the loss of the only comprehensive archive of the early Internet community in existence.

Dejanews isn't the same. That was an archive of a dying technology. This isn't the same case. Usenet was a dying technology, ultimately killed by http.

Cloudflaree has always done the free thing to raise it's popularity. You are right that as companies get bigger it can be harder to keep revenue growing and they slowly start to cross lines they didn't before though. If that company has built reliance on it's free tools which have reduced diversity, when they start to cross lines it can be sort of a trap. This usually isn't intentional now but it is just how things work... Years from now revenue growth might require crossing a line...