Per his blog, Fast.ly is now hosting the npm registry, so the money is not going for hosting. It's to build some kind of sellout business.<p>Back in July he must've seen this coming because he switched the npm license from MIT to the more restrictive Artistic 2.0: <a href="https://github.com/npm/npm/commit/c32391b1efd70a861cebc77e0cc784a46af5de21" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/npm/npm/commit/c32391b1efd70a861cebc77e0c...</a><p>He's already taken away the download numbers on npmjs.org, so maybe he intends to sell the "analytics" back to the community.<p>The guy calls himself a Supreme Emporer on his LinkedIn.
One thing I'm a tad annoyed by - this deal was being put together simultaneously with the "scalenpm" crowdfunding drive. A shoutout to the supporters of that drive would have been nice...
I understand the fact that it can be fairly expensive to run a large, popular module site such as npm and rubygems. What I'm curious about is how they intend to monetize npm, and how it affect users, if it does. Typically, VCs hope to get a return on their investment.
Privately run 'open source' code repositories are not what the open web should run on.<p>I would say that this marks the beginning of the end for npm as anything viable for front-end code repositories and probably for anything related to node.<p>I propose an open-source alternative for front-end JavaScript libraries and dependency management.<p>Anyone calling for npm modules and browserify to rule the day for front-end JS should question their opinions on the matter.
I'm kept wondering how the whole npm structure will look like. At the bottom of npmjs.org it states: 'Powered by Joyent', but Nodejitsu ran the 'Scale npm' donation campaign to get funds to scale the public npm registry. But Nodejitsu acquired IrisCouch and now offers private npm services.<p>And now izs starts a new company npm inc. that will, well, who knows. But he's former Joyent who power npm, so will running npm transfer to npm inc.? But how does Nodejitsu or the 300K that they raised with their campaign fit into this picture?
Multiple points:<p>1. Why are people happy about this? They did a crowd funding round taking common people's money, gave them squat, then took Investor money and gave them a share. (Would make me mad if I was part of the crowd)<p>2. What is the business model? In what world does PIP or any other package manager have a revenue stream? Ads? Spyware? There are no good models for this.<p>3. Does anyone else think that having a company title of Supreme Emporer is a sign that this is not a founder focused on community?<p>I'd say we bounce and use something else, but I did that a long time ago, so I can only suggest everybody else make like an external node. (a leaf ;-) )
Going to be watching Nginx and other deals very closely as far as their long-term health.<p>I could take a giggly pot-shot at web development in general by proposing that they want to monetize node.js via a browser-base service to live one's entire developer life, but I'm in serious agreement with others' concerns that there's something ultimately harmful in VC money getting confused, panicky, and deciding to GSM (Google Mobile Services) the licensing of new code or come up with some ridiculous contributor licensing agreement like what I'm hearing about Ubuntu.<p>Take heed, FOSS communities don't negotiate except on an endless table that runs from one side of the universe to the other.
Soon there will be a new node.js package manager to compete with npm but it will be supported by a non-profit foundation rather than a private profit-driven company.<p>This npm inc. is one of the dumbest startup ideas that I have ever come across. Kudos to the founders for managing to hack the VCs, but VCs that dumb ain't gonna be around for long.
I'm a huge fan of Node.js, but I'm getting an uneasy feeling about all the different changes and things happening. I still haven't made up my mind if it's a justified feeling or not.
So... someone enlighten me here; why does a project like npm need funding at all? If projects like GCC, which are far more complex, can subsist via contributions and donations alone, so what makes npm, a package manager, different?