Nat Friedman, the CEO of GitHub, announced that GitHub has signed an agreement to acquire npm. “npm, inc.” is the company behind the extremely popular Node package manager, the npm Registry, and npm CLI. Through these tools and services offered by npm, they have become a critical part of the JavaScript world these past 10 years. Back in 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub to become a steward of the Open Source community that GitHub has become, Now, with GitHub acquiring npm, they are growing this proof of love for Open Source and will certainly be growing in their stewardship for the Open Source community.

With this acquisition, it has been announced that the public npm registry, depended on by millions of developers, will “always be available and always be free.” Also, Friedman listed a few focus areas that GitHub will maintain for npm as the acquisition deals is completed:

• Invest in the registry infrastructure and platform to ensure npm is fast, reliable, and scalable
• Improve the core experience for developers and maintainers
• Actively engage with the JavaScript community to hear your ideas and help define the future of npm

The amazing energy and creativity of millions of JavaScript developers is evident every day in the work that appears in npm. We are honored to support that community in a new way. The future of npm and the JavaScript ecosystem is very bright.

Nat Friedman, CEO GitHub

They will also be continuing to support all the paying npm Pro, Teams, and Enterprise customers hosting private registries. They will also be working to integrate GitHub with npm through the GitHub Packages feature providing a multi-language packages registry that is fully integrated with GitHub.

Within the official npm announcement of the acquisition are a few “TLDR” points to be aware of regarding the acquisition:

• npm, Inc., is being purchased by GitHub
• The public registry remains public, free, and as available as ever.
• npm as you know it continues, and in fact, there is good reason to believe that it’ll only get better.

The acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft was a bit confusing and uneasily taken by the community. However, Microsoft has done good as a steward of the Open Source community by investing heavily in the growth of GitHub with the addition of great features like GitHub Actions and more. With the acquisition of npm by GitHub, it should be safe to say that the same level of care and investment will be taken in relation to this acquisition as well. It’s really exciting to see how much Microsoft is embracing the Open Source community, and how much they have been willing to invest in it as they grow even further into a new Microsoft of the future.

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