Invest in the registry infrastructure and platform. The JavaScript ecosystem is massive and growing quickly. It needs a rock-solid registry. We will make the investments necessary to ensure that npm is fast, reliable, and scalable.
Improve the core experience. 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.
Engage with the community. We will actively engage with the JavaScript community to get your ideas and help us define the future of npm.
Nothing overly substantive in the announcement. npm has had a lot of issues in the past few years in direction and management. I am sure the price of npm was well below their peak.
Top comments (39)
Microsoft sure ain't making it a secret that they're monopolizing the world of open-source. 😂
They're not monopolizing it; they're embracing it. Very, very, firmly.
Embrace
Extend
...?
...
...?
Profit.
Well..... I bet by framing this as "GitHub is acquiring..." they're obfuscating it a bit.
Microsoft went from hating open source to full blown lets own it all.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Tbh, I don't see it as bad news at all, for example, Look what Microsoft has done with Github.
I'm probably not paying much attention, but what has Microsoft done with GitHub?
Free private repos, to some that may not sound a lot, but to students ...
I have that at gitlab too, and that without Microsoft.
Of course you do, but github remains the defacto place to showcase your opensource projects. And having the ability to have your repo private before publishing it so you can polish it before releasing is quite nice.
Github Student already made private repos free to students before Microsoft swooped in js
Yes, but actually no. Your school had to be part of the "student pack" programe. If by any chance you are a student in a school which was not part of this programe you would be out of luck.
Github Student made it free for students, under those conditions. Now, everyone has private repos!
Funding? Running Github is an expensive endeavor.
Still they haven't done anything. They just provided the funds.
If I am not mistaken, they also made new features such as actions or projects.
I have very mixed feelings on this. Microsoft controlling such a large part of JS eco system (Not to mention Github and VSCode) is a bit scary. It takes away from the spirit of what NPM was. Even Github now has a dirty taste to it. Even if some will argue MS has made it better. Call me a rebel or open source junkie, but I believe that this will be a major shift in the JS economy going forward.
I long for the day when technology allows us to build systems like NPM without needing rely on any outside business to fund it.
It is true that it's scary when a big corporation owns too much of anything. But it was not just buying big players, they built VS Code and as far as I know didn't cheat anyone into using. It if were crap, no one would use it.
The worst thing that can happen: all tools will only work on Windows OS 😂
The great thing about open source is no one owns it. MS bought the company behind npm, but if they do anything people don't like they can take the code for themselves and do something different. MS will likely impact what the npm organization does, and that will impact the users of npm, but there is a reason open source is so freaking fantastic, it offers some protections against these very fears, imho.
There is Yarn, but that's Facebook, also a big company.
My guess:
They embrace OSS because they are converting Windows to Linux under the hood. They think that their software business as they know it is over and OSS should take care of it more and more. They will focus on their UI and Azure in the future.
To make it easier to get free labour and have more control, they buy OSS tools like GitHub and NPM and try to make them more accessible for the MS ecosystem.
If you can't beat em buy em.. :P
I see this coming mile away. I knew they had too and I'm glad. It's a different Microsoft now. Satya is doing great.
This is really scary for me!
A while ago GitHub banned us Iranians! For no reason literally!
Hope it doesn't happen with npm :|
I remember some of the people involved in the open source community was trying to push for a npm alternative under a foundation.
There have been a couple: open-registry, entropic. They both seem to have withered on the vine, though.
I think it's great news to developers who uses npm every day. :)
Yeah I think it's good overall for such a key piece of infrastructure to be owned by such a large and stable company. And oddly enough I think Microsoft is more open and trustworthy in many ways than say Google or Apple.
Embrace, Extend , Entinguish . Soon enough, we will have to pay before doing npm install
I don't think so, this microsoft under satya knows what they are doing , extorting money from OSS is not one of them for sure
Yeah! i also heard that news looking forward to see npm at it's best 🔥
VS Code
GitHub
Typescript
NPM
Microsoft is becoming the God of web tools
It's time that they create a JavaScript framework too 😁😁
They already did but it wasn't successful, WinJS
It would be a disaster
Watch npm lose its values in 3.. 2.. 1..
That ship's sailed, what with the union-busting and all last year.