A better future for JavaScript that won't happen

In the wake of the largest supply-chain attack in history, the JavaScript community could have a moment of reckoning and decide: never again. As the panic and shame subsides, after compromised developers finish re-provisioning their workstations and rotating their keys, the ecosystem might re-orient itself towards solving the fundamental flaws that allowed this to happen.

After all, people have been sounding the alarm for years that this approach to dependency management is reckless and dangerous and broken by design. Maybe this is the moment when the JavaScript ecosystem begins to understand the importance and urgency of this problem, and begins its course correction. It could leave behind its sprawling dependency trees full of micro-libraries, establish software distribution based on relationships of trust, and incorporate the decades of research and innovation established by more serious dependency management systems.

Perhaps Google and Mozilla, leaders in JavaScript standards and implementations, will start developing a real standard library for JavaScript, which makes micro-dependencies like left-pad a thing of the past. This could be combined with a consolidation of efforts, merging micro-libraries into larger packages with a more coherent and holistic scope and purpose, which prune their own dependency trees in turn.

This could be the moment where npm comes to terms with its broken design, and with a well-funded effort (recall that, ultimately, npm is GitHub is Microsoft, market cap $3 trillion USD), will develop and roll out the next generation of package management for JavaScript. It could incorporate the practices developed and proven in Linux distributions, which rarely suffer from these sorts of attacks, by de-coupling development from packaging and distribution, establishing package maintainers who assemble and distribute curated collections of software libraries. By introducing universal signatures for packages of executable code, smaller channels and webs of trust, reproducible builds, and the many other straightforward, obvious techniques used by responsible package managers.

Maybe other languages that depend on this broken dependency management model, like Cargo, PyPI, RubyGems, and many more, are watching this incident and know that the very same crisis looms in their future. Maybe they will change course, too, before the inevitable.

Imagine if other large corporations who depend on and profit from this massive pile of recklessly organized software committed their money and resources to it, through putting their engineers to the task of fixing these problems, through coming together to establish and implement new standards, through direct funding of their dependencies and by distributing money through institutions like NLNet, ushering in an era of responsible, sustainable, and secure software development.

This would be a good future, but it’s not the future that lies in wait for us. The future will be more of the same. Expect symbolic gestures – mandatory 2FA will be rolled out in more places, certainly, and the big players will write off meager donations in the name of “OSS security and resilience” in their marketing budgets.

No one will learn their lesson. This has been happening for decades and no one has learned anything from it yet. This is the defining hubris of this generation of software development.

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