Microsoft owned GitHub has announced that they will acquire one of the most popular javascript package manager npm. Both GitHub and npm announced the deal in their respective blog post. Although none of them has shared any information about the purchase price.
In 2018 Microsoft acquire the GitHub which is a very popular code hosting and collaboration platform for the developers. Whereas npm is a key part of the JavaScript ecosystem, home to more than 1.3 million packages with 75 billion downloads a month. Microsoft has a plan to integrate npm with the GitHub platform. Which hopefully will make the combined community even more appealing to JavaScript developers.
Every acquisition news brings concerns about the changes in the platform, the same is also true here. However, Microsoft says it is looking to invest in and develop what exists rather than just swallowing it up. he company says it will make the necessary investments to ensure the npm is a fast, reliable and scalable registry.
GitHub CEO Nat Friedman said in his post, “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.” He also said, “For the millions of developers who use the public npm registry every day, npm will always be available and always be free.”
He also adds, “For paying customers who use npm Pro, Teams, and Enterprise to host private registries, we will continue to support you. We are also investing heavily in GitHub Packages as a great multi-language packages registry that’s fully integrated with GitHub. Later this year, we will enable npm’s paying customers to move their private npm packages to GitHub Packages — allowing npm to exclusively focus on being a great public registry for JavaScript”.
Read GitHub’s blog post and read npm’s blog post about the acquisition.