GitHub is acquiring NPM, a small startup that provides a crucial service to 12 million developers

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GitHub is acquiring NPM, a small startup that provides a crucial service to 12 million developers
Isaac Schlueter_npm

NPM

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NPM co-founder and chief open technology officer Isaac Schlueter

  • On Monday, GitHub announced it will acquire NPM, a startup that provides JavaScript tools for 12 million developers.
  • Just last year, GitHub announced a competitive product to NPM.
  • NPM had been rocked with turmoil in the past year, as many employees and executives resigned, the leadership team tried to establish a sustainable business model, and the company struggled to raise money, according to former employees.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Microsoft-owned GitHub announced Monday that it is acquiring NPM, a small startup that provides tools for 12 million developers.

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Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. NPM is known for its free tools for JavaScript, the top programming language according to GitHub, and it has 75 billion downloads a month.

"We at GitHub are honored to be part of the next chapter of NPM's story and to help NPM continue to scale to meet the needs of the fast-growing JavaScript community," GitHub CEO Nat Friedman said in a blog post.

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With NPM, GitHub plans to continue investing in its JavaScript tools, engage with the JavaScript developer community, and improve NPM's tools for developers by adding features for publishing and multi-factor authentication. GitHub will work to make NPM work seamlessly with its own features, and NPM's free registry of JavaScript tools will continue to stay free.

Last May, GitHub announced a competitive product to NPM called GitHub Packages, which helps developers easily find, manage, and publish the software packages that help their projects run properly. GitHub plans to allow NPM's current paying customers to move their private software packages to GitHub Packages.

"As we dug into the technical and strategic plans for how npm would fit into the vision of GitHub moving forward, it became clear that this isn't just a good option for the JavaScript community - it's significantly better than what NPM, Inc., can provide on its own," NPM co-founder and chief open technology officer Isaac Schlueter, wrote in a blog post.

NPM has been rocked with over a year of turmoil in the past year and a half. Last year, employees were working to unionize and signed an open letter to management for better working conditions. Former employees said the company culture eroded into an "atmosphere of fear" as the leadership team tried to establish a sustainable business model for the company and struggled to raise money. Executives like co-founder Laurie Voss and CEO Bryan Bogensberger resigned from the company.

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