[simonw]

"In hindsight it's likely that all they wanted from the purchase was AI training material."

Microsoft already owned GitHub. I don't see how acquiring npm would make a meaningful difference with respect to training material, especially since npm was already an open package repository which anyone could download without first buying the company.

[leptons]

Not all NPM packages are hosted on github. I don't know what the number is, but I know I don't have my NPM packages on github (instead, bitbucket).