Why Microsoft’s GitHub Is Buying Npm

By Amit Chowdhry ● Mar 17, 2020
  • Microsoft subsidiary GitHub announced it is buying Npm. These are the details about the deal you should know about.

Microsoft subsidiary GitHub announced it is buying Npm, which is a company that distributes packages of open-source software in JavaScript. Plus Npm also offers software that companies use for proprietary code, according to CNBC. The terms of the deal were undisclosed.

This deal proves that Microsoft is pushing to help enterprises adopt open-source software. Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion and many open-source advocates were concerned about what Microsoft would do with the code repository service. However, Microsoft provided GitHub with the resources it needed to develop better technologies such as a mobile app for iOS and Android.

“npm is a critical part of the JavaScript world. 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,” said GitHub CEO Nat Friedman in a blog post. “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.”

npm founder and CEO Isaac Schlueter pointed out that there are some “awesome opportunities for improvement in the npm experience,” which would meaningfully improve life for JS devs in countless large and small ways. And Schlueter said that things would be made more reliable, convenience, and connected for everyone across the JavaScript ecosystem.