Microsoft owned GitHub has announced it is buying popular JavaScript repository npm for an undisclosed amount.
The npm repository hosts over 1.3 million JavaScript libraries, containing over 75 billion downloads a month by almost 12 million developers.
Both the companies announced that this deal will help the open-source JavaScript community immensely. Microsoft plans to integrate npm into GitHub with an aim to invest and develop the platform to make it a fast, reliable and scalable, whilst still keeping it free.
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Announcing the deal, Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub said, “We’ll integrate GitHub and npm to improve the security of the open-source software supply chain, and enable you to trace a change from a GitHub pull request to the npm package version that fixed it.”
He further added, “GitHub Sponsors has already paid out millions of dollars to open source contributors, and we’re excited to explore tasteful ways to extend it to the npm ecosystem.”
He announced that the npm paid users, Pro, Teams, and Enterprise, who host private registries will continue to get the same benefits as earlier. These users will also get a chance to move their private npm packages to GitHub later this year while keeping npm a public repository for JavaScript.
The deal comes at the right time for npm, as the company lost several of its senior executives last year.
Isaac Schlueter, founder and CEO of npm, is very impressed with the way GitHub has fared over the years and said, “As GitHub has branched out into other aspects of the end-to-end developer community experience, it’s natural to see how the JavaScript package management process fits into that story."
He added, "It's not a loss leader or an experimental add-on or a way to quickly hire a team. Rather, the npm registry is a significant and concrete strategic asset serving GitHub’s mission of eliminating transaction costs in software development.”
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