Gotta respect how Microsoft couldn't build anything the open source community wanted to work with/on so instead they used their Windows and Office monopoly to buy everyone's favorite playgrounds.
Indeed, these two projects alone have turned around my long-held opinion on Microsoft, to "cautiously optimistic".
TypeScript and VS Code have been an invaluable contribution to the community. I'm a daily user of both and so thankful for the talent, ingenuity and effort that have gone into them.
How Microsoft have managed the acquisition of GitHub, giving them autonomy and infrastructure support - so far, it's been all around positive.
Now with NPM under their wings, the centralization does worry me somewhat. I hope there are conscientious decision-makers who will guide the project for the good of community and ecosystem.
They should & deserve to have full control over everything they've created.
You can blame AWS/GCP for letting GitHub & npm be acquired, how many years were they on the open market?
Most of the $$$ in OSS is being funneled towards rent-seeking major cloud providers that are hosting OSS software, whom should all have blank checks with the money they've reaped so far, but seems only Microsoft has the strategic savvy to focus on acquiring the obvious targets for increasing dev mindshare. I don't fault them for their M&A's, it's just good business.
It's also not like Amazon is being an amazing open source citizen; I don't see them acquiring the tech to be an automatically-better outcome than the current version of Microsoft doing so.
IMO this shows the importance of separating technology from platform. Ideally we would have non-profit groups with good governance & corporate support (rather than control) to grow these technologies. If an open source project can be acquired, it's only so free.
