It's an important piece of node itself, and I'm a little wary of it becoming a VC funded startup, to be honest.

By all means not an official statement, but Isaac is quite committed to making sure that the long-term safety of the npm registry doesn't rely on the future benevolence of npm Inc.

There's an interview where Isaac says if npm would sell to anyone (which it wouldn't) it would definitely not be to Joyent.

+1 re new stuff. npm v3 has some rad de-duplication stuff on the way.

It's nice that Isaac doesn't want to, but what if the VCs decide he should? Do we know what the ownership breakdown is at this point?

It's possible (and probably from the investors expected) that npm Inc grows large enough that a Solaris-based hosting company wouldn't be large enough to purchase them.

If npm isn't ever going to sell out how are their VCs planning on making any return on investment? Go public? (Which is arguably selling to the public)

hmm. I don't going public is the likely option.

Well, look at Palantir. They are a very large privately owned and VC funded company with no plans to pursue an IPO.

I'm curious if Joyent being a steward of node.js tends to convert people into paying Joyent hosting customers.

I doubt that npm would be very strategic -- but first you would have to answer the question of whether node.js itself is strategic.

There's certainly an element free publicity among developers. How much is that worth?

(Disclosure: I am the CTO of Joyent.)

We are not and have not been the stewards of node.js to convert node.js developers into paying Joyent customers; rather, we became the stewards because we employed Ryan Dahl at the time (summer 2010), we were (and are) avid and early users of node.js ourselves, and we saw that node.js needed corporate stewardship. The node.js community has come a long way since then, of course, and earlier this year we announced our intention of moving node.js into a foundation -- which is now well underway.

In terms of how node.js fits into our business, we have always been upfront that we have never monetized node.js directly: to the extent we have monetized it, it has been by offering complementary products like an IaaS platform that was designed to run node.js in production[1] and via support and services[2].

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/node-summit2013

[2] https://www.joyent.com/nodejs-support

Actually, there's a lot of movement to move the stewardship of node.js away from Joyent and into a foundation. Not being the stewards going forward, it may make less sense for them to acquire npm, especially as it's not clear how much revenue they'll be able to generate.

Lol. You missed a really interesting real-life soap opera series about io.js/Node/npm/core developers. I believe at one point isaacs wanted to do npm stuff inside Joyent but management was an issue.