GitHub, the software development version control company that was acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion back on Jun 04, 2018, announced today that they have acquired NPM, the package manager for JavaScript programming language.
The news was announced by both CEOs of GitHub and NPM.
In the announcement blog post, Nat Friedman, the current CEO of GitHub, talked about the three-point that GitHub will focus on after the acquisition closes:
- Invest in the registry infrastructure and platform
- Improve the core experience
- Engage with the community
Nat also said that GitHub will work on increasing the security of NPM:
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.
NPM founder and CEO, Isaac Schlueter said in a blog post that they are committed to keeping the npm registry free for open source development as well as “making things more reliable, convenient, and connected for everyone across our vast interdependent JavaScript ecosystem.”
It’s worth noting that back in May 10, 2019, GitHub announced their own package management service called: GitHub Package Registry.
People online had two different reactions, some welcomed the move and we’re happy with the news and the others, were not. Make sure to read the replies on the both announcement tweets made by GitHub and NPM to see developers’ reactions all around the world.