Microsoft’s GitHub Acquires npm
Today has been a pretty hectic day in terms of news. We found out Windows 10 has more than a billion active devices, and we also got to see the official Xbox Series X specs. But one of the biggest news today is something entirely different.
Microsoft-owned GitHub is acquiring npm, the world’s most popular JavaScript package manager. npm is insanely popular amongst JavaScript developers, with more than 1.3 million packages on the platform. npm apparently servees roughly 12 million developers worldwide, who make around 75 billion downloads of these packages every month.
GitHub says npm will continue to be free to developers for now and the future, and that is barely surprising at all. Going forward, GitHub wants to make “investments” necessary to develop npm in terms of performance, reliability, and scalability.
“We will work to improve the everyday experience of developers and maintainers, and support the great work already started on the npm v7 CLI, which will remain free and open source. Some bigger features that we’re excited about are Workspaces and improvements to the publishing and multi-factor authentication experience,” said GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
In the future, the company plans to integrate GitHub and npm to further improve security and enable developers to closely trace npm packages from within their pull requests. For paying customers of npm Pro, Teams, and Enterprise, GitHub plans to allow those users to move their private npm packages to GitHub Packages. It seems like GitHub plans to eventually kill the paid npm services, and make the service a completely free, public registry for JavaScript.