GitHub CEO Nat Friedman announced that GitHub has signed an agreement to acquire NPM and will focus on building a reliable registry infrastructure and improving the core experience and code security.
This is big news for the whole developer ecosystem. NPM stands for Node Package Manager, which is a JavaScript/Node Package Manager. To date, NPM has served more than 12 million developers with more than 1.3 million packages, which are downloaded 75 billion times a month.
Most developers know that Node.js didn’t take off without NPM, and NPM has grown to its current size without Node.js.
When Node.js was first born, it lacked a separate package manager, so its authors and NPM authors hit it off and built NPM into Node.js.
With the popularity of Node.js, people started using NPM to share JavaScript code, so the author of jQuery released jQuery to NPM. With the growing influence of NPM, sharing code with NPM has become standard for front-end engineers.
However, due to its open source business form, coupled with the non-professional enterprise operation, it has been constantly in financial crisis since its establishment. The company has also seen frequent scandals in the past year, and NPM’s management has changed several times in the past year. Former NPM employees and community developers, unhappy with the company, created a rival to NPM.
Joining GitHub may be one of the best solutions for NPM in the face of crisis and risk at all levels. “As a startup, we had big dreams that were hard to achieve,” NPM founder Schlueter said in a blog post. This is an opportunity to make those dreams come true.”
For GitHub and Microsoft, buying NPM makes more strategic sense.