Right, so I’ve mentioned before (though not on this thread) that I really like how Nuget has handled this, and basically it works like this:
- If you register a namespace, any packages you own that use that namespace get alittle icon that says “hey, this is part of this namespace”.
- Existing packages that use a newly registered namespace can continue to exist, but do not get that namespace icon.
- New packages that use that namespace are rejected unless the person trying to create them is a member of that namespace.
- Namespaces can be flagged as “public”, which basically means the third item in this list doesn’t exist for those packages, and anyone can continue to upload packages, but only ones by the “official” namespace get the little icon thing.
For Nuget, getting a namespace requires applying for the namespace, and getting it approved, they have some rough guidelines for criteria they use:
- Does the package ID prefix properly and clearly identify the package owner?
- Are a significant number of the packages that have already been submitted by the owner under the package ID prefix?
- Is the package ID prefix something common that should not belong to any individual owner or organization?
- Would not reserving the package ID prefix cause ambiguity and confusion for the community?
- Are the identifying properties of the packages that match the package ID prefix clear and consistent (especially the package author)?
They have one more thing about licenses, but that doesn’t really apply to us.
So the fact it requires an application + approval and that there are some criteria that can roughly be boiled down to “is your use of this prefix notable enough for us to block all future people from using it”, it means it’s a lot harder for their to be a land grab kind of situation going on.
We could also expose this information in the APIs, for projects that want to take advantage of it (hypothetically, you could imagine pip search telling you if something is part of a reserved namespace or not) but accepting that information should be compeltely optional.
For more information on how Nuget works, you can read https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/reference/id-prefix-reservation and personally I’d just wholesale steal borrow text from that, adjusting where it makes sense.