(Author here.) Actually it's fairly easy to swap out npm for another package manager. Under the hood, npm is just CouchDB, meaning you can replicate from npm by

(Author here.) Actually it's fairly easy to swap out npm for another package manager. Under the hood, npm is just CouchDB, meaning you can replicate from npm by simply clicking the "replicate" button in CouchDB's Futon UI. There are also plenty of npm-like alternative implementations, such as Sinopia, local-npm, Nexus, etc. You can also just `npm pack`, host the tarball, and `npm install` from the tarball. For better or worse, npm is the package manager for JavaScript – it won. We definitely need to be vigilant to make sure npm (the company) doesn't add proprietary features that lock us in to their service, but that's another reason the PouchDB team didn't choose scoped packages – it doesn't play very nicely with the rest of the npm-esque ecosystem, due to not being part of the main CouchDB changes feed (as well as other issues). Although, I'm told by npm folks that many of those issues with scoped packages have been fixed, and they're working on fixing the remaining ones.