GitHub announces the formal acquisition of JavaScript package manager, npm

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Today, Microsoft bought npm for GitHub. Information about the acquisition was published by GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. npm is a package manager for the JavaScript programming language. It is the default package manager for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js. It consists of a command-line client, also called npm, and an online database of public and paid-for private packages called the npm registry.

GitHub Microsoft

As of now, npm has provided more than 1.3 million software packages to more than 12 million developers, which are downloaded 75 billion times a month.

Nat Friedman mentioned in the article that the focus of work after the acquisition is:

  • 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.

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