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What is npm? The package manager for the JavaScript world. How big is it? Used by about 12 million developers, a total of 1.3 million software packages are provided, with 75 billion downloads per month.

In March 2020, the global open source community broke the big news: GitHub announced the acquisition of npm.

What is npm? The package manager for the JavaScript world. How big is it? Used by about 12 million developers, a total of 1.3 million software packages are provided, with 75 billion downloads per month.

Compared with Github's 40 million developers and 100 million managed code, npm is also more than 1x4 in terms of the number of developers.

The exact amount of the acquisition was not disclosed. However, the way the two major developer communities announce their "marriage" is also very special, in which the two bosses have each posted a blog that shows different feelings.

Excited and sensitive.

GitHub's CEO Nat Friedman (Nat Friedman) is clearly no stranger to acquisitions, nearly a year and a half after Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion in June 2018 and Wisenat took over as CEO in October.

In the meantime, Nat has been buying and stocking, first Dependabot, a tool that helps developers monitor dependencies, then Pull Panda, a team collaboration development tool, and then Semmle, a semantic analysis engine that uses community drivers to identify security vulnerabilities. Counting npm, it is already the fourth target.

Of course, npm is not just a tool, it is already the most important part of JavaScript, the largest developer ecosystem in the world. Nat promises that npm will always be available and free for a tool that millions of developers use every day. After the transaction is completed, GitHub will also invest more to ensure that npm is fast, reliable and scalable. [1]

With a rich dad, the two families have changed from now on. Github hosts code under development, while npm is packaged stable code, and the two are a perfect match. Nat said that this involves the important global issue of open source security, and through better integration, the security of the open source supply chain can be improved, allowing developers to track changes from GitHub pull requests to the version of the npm package that fixed it.

For paying users, npm has Premium, team, and Enterprise customers, while Github has its own multilingual pack manager Github Packages, which will be merged later this year.

In contrast to Nat's blog, npm founder Isaac Z. Schlueter published a blog that was both exciting and sensitive.

He reviewed the entrepreneurial process since 2009. Inspired by PHP's PEAR and Perl's CPAN, Isaac wrote a package manager to share with the community. With the rise of Node.js, JavaScript evolved from the front end to the server side. Npm, as the default package manager, makes it easy for developers to install, update and uninstall the library.

Even in 2012, Node.js founder Ryan Dahl left, and Isaac helped manage it for a while. Both of them were colleagues at Joyent in San Francisco at the time.

It's not easy to maintain the open source community while working. At the end of 2013, when npm was in trouble and the community could not survive with donations, Isaac founded npm,Inc in 2014. The company supports the community and more than 10 million users.

After the seed wheel, npm raised another $8 million in the A round in 2015. The team increased from 1 to 35. 'it 's hard to run a company, 'Mr. Isaac said.' there hasn't been enough money, 'Mr. Isaac said.

But npm's mission remains the same: to reduce friction in JavaScript software development. Until the beta version of Github Packages came out, Isaac volunteered to ask GitHub, "Why don't you try to buy us?"

After the acquisition, npm will continue to improve and will become a strategic asset for GitHub, the world's largest developer community, serving GitHub's mission of eliminating transaction costs in software development.

JavaScript ecology

Wired magazine commented that Microsoft will soon control more of the open source software development ecosystem.

In the open source world, ecology, tools, and communities are complex and intertwined. After all, no one wants to reinvent the wheel. Developers often combine programs with open source packages to handle common functions, such as verifying passwords or network communications.

Npm's customers include both individual developers and Fortune 500 companies such as Netflix, VISA, Adobe, salesforce and Nike.

Wherever there is the Internet and websites, there will be JavaScript. With the birth of Netscape browser in 1995, it finally became the standard of client-side scripting language for Web websites of almost all browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and so on.

In 2008, Google launched the JavaScript engine V8, which uses just-in-time compilation and greatly reduces execution time. Node.js was born in 2009 and combines the V8 engine to bring JavaScript to a server-side environment.

Node.js provides event-driven, multiple commands can be run at the same time, and can be used to write highly concurrent programs, combining the ease of learning and use of JavaScript with the power of Unix network programming.

Most of Node.js 's open source libraries are hosted on npm and form a strong developer ecology, including community activities such as NodeConf.

JavaScript developers can easily share code with npm, release software packages to npm, and easily use other people's open source code, forming a huge interdependent open source development ecosystem.

This is something JavaScript developers need to use every day, and everyone wants it to be more reliable and convenient.

Microsoft family bucket

The world open source is a company, now my father is called Microsoft.

Comments also exploded on the Reddit forum. [3]

Some netizens believe that this is a win-win situation for both Microsoft and open source, and Microsoft's Azure can provide better services. Microsoft missed out on the mobile platform, and cloud computing is the next computing platform. Microsoft has a 40-year record of attracting developers.

While some netizens believe that more than half of the development toolkits on hand are provided by Microsoft, including GitHub, npm, VS Code and TypeScript, it is not a good thing for a company to monopolize the developer world.

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