Ask HN: Best practices for distributing a commercial JavaScript library

Hi HN crowd,

I'm planning to launch a commercial software product aimed at businesses in the next couple of months. It's a JavaScript module with heavy client-side processing intended to be integrated into mobile web apps.

Customers sign up for a subscription and get a license key, which they use to "activate" the library - I'm aware of the implications of such a scheme wrt. reverse engineering/abuse, but I will worry about that when I have actual paying customers. I don't handle any payment data, I plan to outsource this by using Paddle (https://www.paddle.com/) as a Merchant of Record.

So far so good... what I'm a bit vague on are the legal bits. I'm bootstrapped and don't want to hire a lawyer as long as I'm not generating revenue. What is the bare minimum of legal documents that I need to provide? Terms & Conditions, License Agreements, Privacy Policy, ... I've heard about all of these but usually click through, like the rest of you. ;-) I saw stuff like Termly.io but somehow I think it's not a good fit (more focused on "Cloud SaaS"). Are there any resources or good templates around? Just copy and modify a competitors documents maybe?

Also I'm not yet sure how to distribute the library. Putting myself in the shoes of a customer-side developer, I just want to type `npm install @awesome/product`, which would mean publishing a minified version on NPM. I use Gitlab for CI and they also have private repositories, which I already use, but which would in turn require me to create access tokens for customers, and also the customers needs to modify `.npmrc`. On the other hand I'd have more control.

Thanks in advance for any pointers and comments.