GitHub is acquiring npm ↦
This.. is a bit of a bombshell:
The work of the npm team over the last 10 years, and the contributions of hundreds of thousands of open source developers and maintainers, have made npm home to over 1.3 million packages with 75 billion downloads a month. Together, they’ve helped JavaScript become the largest developer ecosystem in the world. We at GitHub are honored to be part of the next chapter of npm’s story and to help npm continue to scale to meet the needs of the fast-growing JavaScript community.
Software is eating the world. Meanwhile, Microsoft is eating the software world… one acquisition at a time.
Discussion
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Brett Cannon
Vancouver, BC, Canada
2020-03-22T16:14:33Z ago
Maybe it’s because I’m not embedded in the JS community, but why is this a bombshell? NPM has always been a for-profit company, so why is it shocking that they sold themselves? Or is the shock that it’s Microsoft even though they are a company targeting the developer market (among other things)?
Jerod Santo
Omaha, Nebraska
Jerod co-hosts The Changelog, crashes JS Party, and takes out the trash (his old code) once in awhile.
2020-03-23T13:28:14Z ago
It’s not a surprise that npm would sell itself, especially with some of the troubles the company has faced recently. And yes, like I said above, Microsoft has been scooping up developer-focused organizations for awhile now (GitHub included).
The shock to me is that GitHub had entered npm’s space as its first real competition, which many of us hoped would spur innovation/improvement from both sides as they battled for customers. Instead we now get consolidation, which will likely improve things in the near-term, but rarely works out for the better in the long-term.