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Microsoft today announced its plan to acquire npm, the company behind Node package manager, the npm Registry, and npm CLI. npm is the default package manager for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js. As of today, npm serves over 1.3 million packages to roughly 12 million developers, who download these packages 75 billion times a month. Microsoft mentioned that npm helped JavaScript become the largest developer ecosystem in the world.
Microsoft has now assured that npm will remain free for ever. And Microsoft’s focus will be on the following after acquicition:
- Invest in the registry infrastructure and platform. The JavaScript ecosystem is massive and growing quickly. It needs a rock-solid registry. We will make the investments necessary to ensure that npm is fast, reliable, and scalable.
- Improve the core experience. We will work to improve the everyday experience of developers and maintainers, and support the great work already started on the npm v7 CLI, which will remain free and open source. Some bigger features that we’re excited about are Workspaces and improvements to the publishing and multi-factor authentication experience.
- Engage with the community. We will actively engage with the JavaScript community to get your ideas and help us define the future of npm.
Microsoft also has plans to integrate GitHub and npm to improve the security of the OSS supply chain. Later this year, Microsoft has plans enable npm’s paying customers to move their private npm packages to GitHub Packages. So, npm will exclusively focus on being a public registry for JavaScript.