I wonder how it relates to a few npm forks ( https://github.com/rlidwka/yapm , https://github.com/visionmedia/npm ) created earlier this year, especially to second one since @visionmedia didn't change its name... And what about alternate npm-compatible registries ( https://github.com/mbrevoort/node-reggie , https://github.com/rlidwka/sinopia , https://github.com/cnpm/cnpmjs.org ), not based on CouchDB? "npm" isn't on…
Even without a trademark, the npm source has been Artistic License v2 for as long as I can remember, so any forks are obligated to change their name to have the right to forking the source code.