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Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

blog.npmjs.org

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Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#31

Post by bdcravens »

yapcguy wrote: post #9
phillmv wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the exit going to be? Who are they going to sell to? What revenues are they going to bring in? We're talking VC money, not a grant. Did they just hand over the keys to the node community to someone else?

Money corrupts. It's amazing how things have changed in 10 years. CPAN. Perl. A real community of programmers, system admins, enthusiasts.

Is funding better or worse than corporate sponsorship? The most successful (depending on your metric of course) projects have been backed by corporate dollars. Also, not every project can be a Go or Angular with a multi-billion dollar company behind it.

All of the CPAN mirrors are paid for by somebody. Nothing's free; money is in the equation at some point.

Of course, that's a different model than VC funding. However, you're intimating that NPM isn't "real" with your last statement. The project has run for several years now. This isn't some project that came out of the chute with funding (such as Meteor).

Similar model is GitHub: long-running project/organization, took VC after a few years. In the time since they took the VC, have they become corrupted? Are they not a real community?

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#32

Post by eCa »

bdcravens wrote: post #31
yapcguy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money corrupts. It's amazing how things have changed in 10 years. CPAN. Perl. A real community of programmers, system admins, enthusiasts.

Is funding better or worse than corporate sponsorship? The most successful (depending on your metric of course) projects have been backed by corporate dollars. Also, not every project can be a Go or Angular with a multi-billion dollar company behind it. All of the CPAN mirrors are paid for by somebody. Nothing's free; money is in the equation at some point. Of course, that's a different model than VC funding. However…

The difference is in the goal. Donated/sponsored dollars don't expect to get dollars back. VC invested dollars expects invested_dollars * multiple in return.

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#33

Post by [deleted] »

bdcravens wrote: post #31
yapcguy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money corrupts. It's amazing how things have changed in 10 years. CPAN. Perl. A real community of programmers, system admins, enthusiasts.

Is funding better or worse than corporate sponsorship? The most successful (depending on your metric of course) projects have been backed by corporate dollars. Also, not every project can be a Go or Angular with a multi-billion dollar company behind it. All of the CPAN mirrors are paid for by somebody. Nothing's free; money is in the equation at some point. Of course, that's a different model than VC funding. However…

[deleted]

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#34

Post by [deleted] »

bdcravens wrote: post #31
yapcguy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money corrupts. It's amazing how things have changed in 10 years. CPAN. Perl. A real community of programmers, system admins, enthusiasts.

Is funding better or worse than corporate sponsorship? The most successful (depending on your metric of course) projects have been backed by corporate dollars. Also, not every project can be a Go or Angular with a multi-billion dollar company behind it. All of the CPAN mirrors are paid for by somebody. Nothing's free; money is in the equation at some point. Of course, that's a different model than VC funding. However…

[deleted]

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#35

Post by petercooper »

nbody wrote: post #26
al2o3cr wrote: post #14

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...

Quite true. Even though I didn't donate, I wonder why they went for crowdfunding while they were going raising VC funding. I would expect (partial) refunds.

Didn't the crowdfunding go to the previous host? That is to say, "they" were not the same people as are now handling things(?)

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#36

Post by etler »

seldo wrote: post #24
mmaster5 wrote: post #16

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. Back in July he must've seen this coming because he switched the npm license from MIT to the more restrictive Artistic 2.0: https://github.com/npm/npm/commit/c32391b1efd70a861cebc77e0c... He's already taken away the download numbers on npmjs.org, so maybe he intends to sell the "a…

It's not accurate to say that Fastly is hosting the registry; Fastly are providing CDN services to our registry -- a globally distributed cache -- for which we're very grateful. As of five days ago ( http://blog.npmjs.org/post/75707294465/new-npm-registry-arch... ) we are hosting the registry ourselves; it was previously hosted by Nodejitsu (who still operate a downstream mirror). As for the download counts, per Twit…

It's silly how angry people can get over nothing.

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#37

Post by petercooper »

janjongboom wrote: post #30

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. 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 t…

One assumption would be they keep it to cover their efforts in keeping npm going for years so far.

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#38

Post by slexaxton »

nbody wrote: post #26
al2o3cr wrote: post #14

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...

Quite true. Even though I didn't donate, I wonder why they went for crowdfunding while they were going raising VC funding. I would expect (partial) refunds.

This is a common confusion. The scalenpm crowdfunding was done by the good folks who ran the npm servers for free (mostly nodejitsu) up until the recent switchover to the new infrastructure with Npm, Inc.

You can still use the nodejitsu registry for free if you'd like[1]. They arent likely to need as much scaling anymore, but there's still a big cost to running those servers. I don't think there was any foul play when it comes to the scalenpm money as I'm fairly sure they were not aware of the intent for Npm, Inc to take over default hosting.

tl;dr the money did not go to the same people, and the people who crowd funded thought they'd still be hosting npm going forward at the time.

[1] http://blog.nodejitsu.com/simple-hosted-private-npm-and-regi...

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#39

Post by etler »

nawitus wrote: post #11
IbJacked wrote: post #7

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.

>The future is large, but I can pretty much guarantee that paying for access to open source modules is not ever going to happen. Not because it's evil (though, I believe is), but because it's stupid. It's just not a good model, and it's not hard to see why. No one wants to pay it, and rather than deliver value, you're making people go elsewhere. It is a case of the orchard selling lumber, burning down your value in o…

Makes sense. One obvious power feature, that not only doesn't affect normal users, and would be well worth the money, is a locked down priority server. With npm being an open registry, any author can overwrite any release at any time. I don't want that possibility to happen on production, so if they provided a server with the versions you are using frozen from the general community, I would be interested in that.

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#40

Post by IsaacSchlueter »

sheetjs wrote: post #20
IbJacked wrote: post #7

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.

There are 3 obvious areas of monetization: - paid private repositories on npm or a parallel system (think github) - paid internal npm servers with support (think github enterprise) - statistics that used to be available, like download counts (think imgur pro)

Download counts are coming back. This is literally in progress right now, and was only removed due to technical difficulties.
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