Good speaking with Isaac Schlueter, co-founder of npm, Inc., which runs the world’s largest software registry, including all JavaScript code published. npm is now offering a free version of npm Orgs, its developer collaboration tool that helps teams and organizations efficiently publish and share their code.

Last month, the npm Registry surpassed 100 billion software packages served. With more than 425,000 packages and 350 million daily downloads, it is the world’s largest registry of open source and publicly available, re-usable code.

npm Orgs will be available for free to help users organize and collaborate on public code.

Teams can now provision access for an unlimited number of contributors to an unlimited number of packages published to the public npm Registry, based on individuals’ roles and responsibilities, without having to pay for the use of private packages.

With npm Orgs, individuals can transition seamlessly among open source solo projects, public group projects, and commercial teams, making it easy to combine code from public and private packages into a single project.

In particular, companies that use open source tooling and methods for projects that include proprietary code need to be able to restrict and manage access to certain packages. npm Orgs allows them to do that, with features and benefits that include:

• Role-based access control: organize developers into teams, making it easier and faster to share and collaborate with specific people.

• Semantic versioning: easily communicate and understand which versions of code are compatible with one another.

• Powerful package discovery: quickly search for and discover private and open source code packages.

“We are 100 percent committed to the npm ecosystem,” said Paul Betts, Lead Desktop Developer at Slack Technologies, Inc. “We publish our own public packages, use private packages, and generally try to make anything public that we can. Occasionally, when we need to have private source code, we use Orgs to coordinate our dev efforts — which translates into faster delivery of higher quality code for customers.”

“Ember uses Orgs already and it’s been working great for us,” said Yehuda Katz, co-creator of the Ember JavaScript web framework and co-founder of Tilde, Inc. “Free Orgs for public packages clearly opens up the ability organize packages better. I think this is going to be a big deal for the community.”

npm Orgs is part of npm’s product portfolio, which also includes npm Solo, private packages, and registry notification tools; npm Enterprise, a way for very large companies with complex needs to use npm; and the npm command-line developer tool.

“Today, we’re making it possible for the millions of developers who use the npm Registry to get Orgs for free. Making it easier to collaborate on open source projects benefits the whole community, because anything that reduces friction in software development makes it easier for everyone to build amazing things,” said Isaac Z. Schlueter, CEO of npm, Inc.