Microsoft doesn’t do everything right but the GitHub acquisition has honestly gone better than I ever expected. Rather than forcing GitHub to adopt Microsoft centric policies, Microsoft has adopted more GitHub stuff, especially from a product POV. GitHub still runs as a separate company (different logins and health care and hiring systems) with its own policies and point of view.
The reality is npm was in a bad place and in a land of not good options, this strikes me as the best possibility. I’d rather have GitHub control this and be able to give the resources to npm than a company like Oracle or Amazon or even Google or Facebook to own it. In a perfect world, some independent entity could fund npm out of gratitude but at the same time, consider how poorly npm as a company was run for YEARS and the general lack of direction.
So yeah, I’m cautiously optimistic this won’t be fucked up by GitHub — but I understand the concern.
As for those worried about Microsoft embracing, extending, and extinguishing. Lol. Even if that was the goal (and I truly don’t think that’s the ethos at all any more), Microsoft is laughably incompetent at achieving that sort of strategy. Google and Amazon have the EEE under lock right now (Facebook too — let’s be glad Zuck didn’t buy this after we saw what happened to yarn), but Microsoft can’t even put coherent dev strategy outside of .NET on Azure.