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Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

blog.npmjs.org

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Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#61

Post by morganherlocker »

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)

Stats in general seem like a pretty horrible monetization strategy considering the other obvious routes that would not be met with service-killing scorn. I would be shocked if the first option was not the route they take, with the second possibly coming later.

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#62

Post by mikealAgain »

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…

Here's the history, hope it helps.

I wrote the original version of the npm registry in a day or two on top of CouchDB. I built it quickly and didn't think much about scale.

Isaacs continued to improve and maintain that code. At one point he even wrote up an open standard for generic js package registries for CommonJS but they didn't seem to care (they were too busy arguing about promises).

At the time I wrote the initial code I was employed at CouchOne and we had a small CouchDB hosting platform operated by Jason Smith which is where we ran the registry free of charge. Later on, after CouchOne was aquired by Membase and became Couchbase, it decided to break off the hosting company and give/sell it to Jason Smith, which became IrisCouch.

IrisCouch continued to run the registry for free for several years. They had no venture funding and limited resources but they provided this service for our community anyway. They announced a product for enterprise (hosted) NPM but as far as I know it wasn't really marketed or sold. Last year IrisCouch was acquired by Nodejitsu.

Nodejitsu continued to host the registry for free. Some time last year the infrastructure hit a breaking point, mostly around CouchDB. Remember, I wrote this in a weekend when less than a hundred node packages existed. Many of the semantics from me and Isaacs' initial "prototype" persisted until just a few weeks ago. For instance, this single database held all the package binaries, for every version of a package, attached to the document for that package.

Once the registry started to have serious stability issues a few things happened. Isaacs started to work on ways to improve the reliability by changing how the registry worked and Nodejitsu sought community support for keeping the current registry up. At some point Isaacs also decided it would be best if he worked on NPM full time and built NPM Inc.

In the early days we weren't thinking about 58K modules, that was just crazy, we were just figuring out the simplest way to store a couple packages the node community was writing. Since founding this company Isaacs has already managed to re-write the way the registry works to fit the kind of load we have now.

Nodejitsu is now free of the financial burden that was dragging them down as well and Isaacs' new infrastructure can keep the registry up more cheaply than the previous system and more reliably.

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#63

Post by morganherlocker »

tobyink wrote: post #60
leetreveil wrote: post #55

I would like to see npm become a more generic solution for package management in all languages.

I wouldn't. Most of the languages I use already have far superior solutions for package management.

Examples (genuinely curious)? In my casual experience, it seems to be easier to use than gems or pip and has much larger ecosystem than anything else I have tried, which is the #1 selling point of a package manager IMHO. A good package manager (by my standards) should have:

1. super easy publishing 2. A package for practically everything you can think of and if not, see #1 3. Most of the market share for its particular language so that you can be reasonably sure a particular module maintainer has an up to date package

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#65

Post by paulannesley »

nawitus wrote: post #45
etler wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, you can already specify a particular version that you want to use (though I'm not sure if you can verify that using hashes).

You can specify what version you want. That doesn't necessarily imply that version will continue to be available. Ruby has the same problem with "yanked" versions of gems.

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#67

Post by PyDart »

drakaal wrote: post #49

Multiple points: 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) 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. 3. Does anyone else think that having a…

Exactly. Which is why I am actively gearing up to switch to Dart and (back to) Python as soon as is even painfully feasible. I am also sick to death of all the socio-political posturing and other narcisspewage surrounding the so-called node/npm "culture".

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#68

Post by outside1234 »

deelowe wrote: post #53
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...

Yea. This is really odd. What in the world is going on? Since when is a package manager something you can monetize? I knew about the plans to monetize node, but didn't realize it was going to involve mucking around with npm. This is concerning.

enterprises want to 1) publish their own private packages in an overlay to the public packages and 2) block unvetted packages. there is a business opportunity in providing that to them.

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#69

Post by jameswyse »

morganherlocker wrote: post #59
seldo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your paranoia :-) We are wary of announcing all the stuff we're planning given that we don't know how long it will take to build yet and don't want to be accused of vaporware. However, we are planning to announce at least our initial product plans pretty soon. (Probably not in a comment on a HN thread though ;-))

I just want to say that I would gladly pay for private npm hosting. Something along the lines of github's private vs public repos would be extremely valuable. Yes, we could set up our own private npm server, but this seems like an obvious thing to outsource to a service as long as the pricing is not crazy. Best of luck!

We've been using Gemfury[1] for our private modules which has worked out well, no problems in over a year of use.. though I'd probably switch over to npm if they offered private hosting.

[1] http://www.gemfury.com/

Re: Npm Raises $2.6M Seed Round

#70

Post by 1qaz2wsx3edc »

mikealAgain wrote: post #58
1qaz2wsx3edc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also kind of funny that Meteor.JS by contrast got $11.2m in funding. And NPM the underpinning technology which has further reaching economic benefits only receives $2.6m. I know it's a bit apple and oranges, but four times the value? The valuation of software is surrealism. All that said, I love them both dearly.

That was Meteor.js' Series A round after they finished their time at YC. NPM did 2.6M in Seed.

Solid point, thanks for the clarification.
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