Microsoft-owned GitHub announced Monday that it is acquiring NPM, a small startup that provides tools for 12 million developers.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. NPM is known for its registry of free tools for JavaScript, the top programming language according to GitHub, and it has 75 billion downloads a month.
Sources close to the company said they believed that the terms of the deal were not good for employees and NPM's co-founders as the company needed to bail out investors. Another former employee expressed relief that the registry, which is a "core asset" for web developers, would be in the hands of a company like Microsoft that he believed would be a good custodian.
"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.
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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