Let's face it. Microsoft is a business and at any point in the future it might change course if it has economic preasures to do so. It can only keep being "good" as long as it has a stream of money coming in that allows this to happen. So the important thing is how they make npm economically viable. They need to have a good business model. I can only imagine GitHub was economically viable when they bought it, hence they left it run indpendently since it provides a revenue stream.

"So the important thing is how they make npm economically viable."

Thats not the important thing, thats the problem. Npm could easily be an open source client. Contain less code and be better. And have a mirors system like every other repo so it does not need money for hosting.

Npm wanted to control nodejs and make money out it. And they have.

Microsoft purchased that control and plan to make money out of it.

This is bad news for OS dev.

> Npm could easily be an open source client

The NPM client is and has always been open source: https://github.com/npm/cli.

> Npm wanted to control nodejs and make money out it. And they have.

In what way, other than offering private package hosting for enterprises?

By selling / "doing an exit" to GitHub?

> Npm wanted to control nodejs and make money out it.

What does this even mean?

It means Npm always wanted to be the "one true source" for nodejs code. No matter who wrote the code.

No interest in mirrors from day one.

Npm sold out to Microsoft and got paid. All that free community effort to stop Npms "crashiness" got sold to Microsoft for dollar.

Nodejs went to the Linux foundation.

Npm went to Microsoft.

Suprised?

That's not what I asked.

You said they controlled nodejs, and that they somehow earned money by controlling nodejs. I think that neither of those has ever been the case.