The license is one benefit, yes... but the StrongLoop PM also has support for deployment across multiple machines and integration with nginx for load balancing. And everything can be monitored (including across machines) from a single GUI: StrongLoop Arc.
pm2 is great, but this is not an "added features" play, StrongLoop wrote this process manager from scratch based on experience with very large enterprise clients. In other words, this is a new beast entirely!
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 for the download counts, per Twitter ( https://twitter.com/npmjs/status/422823647619710976 ), we removed the download counts because our original solution for those counts (keeping them in CouchDB) wasn't scaling. I am literally, as we speak, working on the replacement system to restore download counts.
And Isaac's LinkedIn title is a joke. I hope that's obvious.
thanks for answering the questions. i depend on node at my day job, so i am particularly interested in npm's future.
i understand someone has to pay for the servers and development time, but would it be possible to give a hint for the types of things you plan to charge for? Even just a rough sketch of "we will offer private repositories" or "we will offer support." I appreciate the "reassurances" that nothing will change today for me, but the ambiguity prevents my latent paranoia from going away.
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.
(Pssst... hey kid... c'mere a minute. Tell ya somethin'. Ya wanna sell stuff? Then stfu about yer junk. Cuz... <tch> seriously? NO body wants to hear that shit. Know whutta mean? Jus' sayin'...)
And, I hate to tell ya this, but... <ahem>... that guy's title... if it is, as you say, "a joke"... it sure ain't the biggest one.
But, ya don't have to take MY word for it. Life is a great educator. Bit heavy-handed at times, but... you guys'll find that out. Have at it, kid. Take yer best shot.
Hope ya got a 'Plan B'.
StrongLoop employs 2 node core committers, Ben Noordhuis and Bert Belder, who are also two of the most active libuv committers. (They have other folks that work there, of course, but those two also work on Node itself quite a lot.)
Joyent still is the custodian and IP owner of the Node.js project. They pay me to work on node, and also provide the project with marketing, legal, hosting, and other resources. Joyent also uses Node extensively in their technology stack, and builds tools to debug their own and their customers' production Node applications.
StrongLoop will be providing support to users of their Node Distro, which bundles v0.10 with a few battle-tested npm modules.
Joyent and StrongLoop are very different companies, and while they're not officially partners, that I'm aware of, they are certainly not competitors in any sense.
As I read it, Joyent relicenses the IP under MIT, so although they may be the IP "owner" they immediately give anyone a license to do pretty much whatever with the code.
Definitely appreciate that they pay you to work on it. Appreciate that there are new companies in the ecosystem too.
And finally someone who looks like they are going to support Node on Windows and Linux!
“For those looking for commercial support, StrongLoop (Ben Noordhuis & Bert Belder's company) has released a distribution containing node v0.10 that they will support on Windows, Mac, Red Hat/Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu and multiple cloud platforms. You can download their Node distribution here.” —http://blog.nodejs.org/2013/03/11/node-v0-10-0-stable/
