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> Someone has to pay that S3 (I guess CouchDB) and EC2 bills

Previous package managers have done well running on public mirrors donated by universities and businesses around the globe. rubygems finances itself via a non-profit. There is nothing necessary about NPM's business model, IMO it's just a side-effect of the incredible tolerance for private ownership within the node ecosystem. I can't imagine this model would fly for any other language/platform.

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Python's PyPI gets donations from Rackspace (hosting) and Fastly (CDN) to run. See the note at the bottom of https://pypi.python.org/pypi

Scala seems roughly similar.

How?

It is owned by a single corporate entity who is also its primary sponsor, Typesafe. This is similar to how Joyent owns node, and how they sponsor it's development, along with NodeJitsu, Microsoft, Heroku and others.

No. It's "owned" by the EPFL.

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