Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub
by mulmen on Monday March 16, 2020 @03:21PM
(#22596472)
This is sad to read. Why does every project have to be profitable? If NPM is useful users (companies and people) can invest time or cash to support the operations and continued development. This foundation model has been successful across open source and prevents one company from changing the direction of a project to fit their own needs at the expense of everyone else. I think this was critical to the continued growth of open source software over the last two decades. If this trend of selling out to massive corporations continues it will be a major step backwards.
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To be clear that's not what I am arguing here, I agree that package registries should, ideally, be owned and supported by the community. However NPM already had fairly significnat VC investment and as such any transition to a community supported model would be challenging.
The acquisition can be a good outcome for the current situation without it being the ideal state of things.
Profitable of not, they should not run out of money.
Would yo prefer npm infrastructure to be maintained and developed by the lowest-paid programmers they could hire?
Imhi Npm is two things a cli tool, and a central repo that tries to be the one and only js repo: to make money from that position. Their infra costs them money only because that was their angle for selling out.
Linux repos take the alternative approach to try to get as many mirrors as possible so it can remain free.
Microsoft did not buy npm to help it become free. Believe. They bought it because they rekon they can make buck out of it.
That buck comes from somewhere.
Nodejs going to the Linux foundation was good news.
Microsoft buying Npm is bad news.