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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

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mbesto

> It depends on what the alternative is.

Ruby Gems, PHP composer, PIP, etc. would all like a word with you....

https://rubygems.org/pages/sponsors

https://www.python.org/psf/

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Isn't it more that NPM specifically has had a bumpy ride, and people are seeing this acquisition as a sign of better times to come, and it not being a value judgment of other open source initiatives.

Yeah, and the PSF is worried that the possible cancellation of PyCon could send the whole foundation broke.

The fact that there's a bunch of critical infra run on a precarious volunteer shoestring is not a good thing.

Maybe look in your node_modules folder sometime, eh? Or the Linux kernel. The whole world runs their critical infrastructure on volunteer work.

You haven't bothered looking at the contributers to Linux since 1997, I take it.

Hmm, not everyone is a volunteer...

That's a path but NPM already being a company with signficant VC investment would a transition to such a model workout with the existing stakeholders? Also NPM is quite a bit bigger than both the Ruby and Python library spaces.

> Also NPM is quite a bit bigger than both the Ruby and Python library spaces.

I don’t know, so I have to ask, what’s the metric here?

Perhaps because Node code bases when deployed cause the package manager (npm) to consume more bandwidth in general than comparable Ruby or Python code bases due to higher dependence on third-party packages?

As at Oct. 2018, the top 12 npm packages [1] were already doing more than 0.5 billion downloads a month. Granted, popularity has waned for a few of those top packages due to deprecation or new language features, for instance.

EDIT:

NPM’s announcement about the acquisition [2] provides up-to-date numbers:

“Today, npm serves over 1.3 million packages to roughly 12 million developers, who download these things 75 billion times a month ...”

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18343604

2: http://blog.npmjs.org/post/612764866888007680/next-phase-mon...

You're probably right with all the one-off and fairly small dependencies in the npm ecosystem. Seeing those numbers would be pretty neat to compare side-by-side.

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