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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

GitHub is at an interesting inflection point. Before the acquisition, VCs stoked the growth by giving away bandwidth and storage. Now that GitHub is a Microsoft property, the same continues because MS has been on a ten-year mission to build goodwill in the developer community.

That may not last forever. The original GitHub people will gradually drift away once their vesting concludes. If overall growth stalls, Microsoft management may yet feel the temptation to start squeezing GitHub for cash.

I suspect they'll acquire NPM along the way too, to have a better lock-in in place.

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> I suspect they'll acquire NPM along the way too, to have a better lock-in in place.

No matter if someone is going to acquire npm or not, npm registry is clearly degrading in value provided to users, while trying to earn a profit.

I recently started a project to do something about it, called Open-Registry (https://open-registry.dev).

Basically, it's a new package registry compatible with npm (proxy to the npm inc registry) that is 100% community funded and has a explicit governance that the community owns it.

Microsoft won't acquire npm for sure.

I highly doubt MS will ever squeeze GitHub for cash also. It's about integration and azure.

They have proved by now that they are not Oracle and they are doing the opposite of them.

- making development more open ( .net core vs Java)

- making tools more open ( eg. Sms vs MySQL, vscode, ...)

Both have clouds. Microsoft is adding/creating more free tools/services as their onboarding funnel. Development ease is their motivation.

Oracle buys popular things and starts licensing them. They try to force existing clients into their cloud ( MS makes it optional). Oracle's motivation is management influencing

Microsoft (like many companies before, and many companies in the future) change. The went from cool, to not cool, to cool again in the eyes of the developer hive-mind.

I don't think we can say for sure that Microsoft will forever act the way they are acting now, as in the end it's run by people and those people eventually become replaced with others.

Saying that a company has "proven" something and that means they will act a certain way forever seems unhealthy.

NPM could use some cleaning. It's a single point of failure without the governance, the worst of both worlds kind of thing.

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