Pretty wild future where the company that actively tried to discredit and destroy the entire concept of open source for an entire decade now owns both the world's largest site for hosting open source repositories and the world's largest open source package manager.
I'm still 50/50 on whether we see the embrace->extend->extinguish cycle play out here in the long term. The old guard still lives.
Reminder: the CEO publicly said "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/bal… "Our goal is to try to educate people on what it means to protect intellectual property and pay for it properly." Is it?
"Embrace, extend, extinguish", and FUD generally, were official policy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween… Microsoft is playing nice, but it's a publicly traded company. If its existence is threatened, as represented by its financial position, then it will exploit its assets to save itself.
Celebrating a massive private company buying a shared public resource, especially a critical resource like NPM that we all use, seems very naive to me. It doesn't even matter which company it is. We all carry the risk that the owner decides to cash out in 5 years or 30 years.
The root danger here is that NPM is privately owned; Microsoft is just a particularly scary owner. NPM being privately owned was unprecedented as far as I know. CPAN, PyPI, RubyGems, etc... all of them get the job done, sometimes with difficulty, but none were privately owned.
When NPM was created, there was no reason to think that putting ownership of the packaging ecosystem in private capital's hands was necessary. All evidence pointed the other way! (But I don't know why it was done, so I'm not trying to imply any particular motivations here.)
