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<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en"> <head><meta charset="UTF-8"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"><link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/favicon.ico"><title>About | node-opcua</title><link rel="canonical" href="https://node-opcua.github.io/about.html"><meta name="description" content="The story behind node-opcua — how a side project at a nuclear plant became the most widely used OPC UA stack for Node.js."><!-- Open Graph --><meta property="og:title" content="About | node-opcua"><meta property="og:description" content="The story behind node-opcua — how a side project at a nuclear plant became the most widely used OPC UA stack for Node.js."><meta property="og:image" content="https://node-opcua.github.io/og-default.png"><meta property="og:url" content="https://node-opcua.github.io/about.html"><meta property="og:type" content="website"><!-- Twitter Card --><meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"><meta name="twitter:title" content="About | node-opcua"><meta name="twitter:description" content="The story behind node-opcua — how a side project at a nuclear plant became the most widely used OPC UA stack for Node.js."><meta name="twitter:image" content="https://node-opcua.github.io/og-default.png"><!-- Organization JSON-LD (site-wide) --><script type="application/ld+json">{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Organization","name":"node-opcua","url":"https://node-opcua.github.io","logo":"https://node-opcua.github.io/logos/sterfive-logo.png","description":"The open-source OPC UA stack for Node.js, maintained by Sterfive.","sameAs":["https://github.com/node-opcua","https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-opcua","https://www.sterfive.com"]}</script><!-- Slot for child layout head content (JSON-LD etc.) --><script>(function(){const gaId = "G-J4DZPPT47Y";

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<style>.about-content[data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r]{max-width:42rem;margin:0 auto;padding:var(--space-section, 4.5rem) 1.5rem}h1[data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r]{font-family:var(--font-sans);font-size:clamp(2rem,4vw,2.75rem);font-weight:700;color:var(--ink);margin-bottom:2.5rem;letter-spacing:-.025em;line-height:1.15}.origin-block[data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r]{border-left:3px solid var(--accent);padding-left:1.5rem;margin-bottom:2.5rem}.lede[data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r]{font-size:1.15rem;line-height:1.6;color:var(--ink);font-weight:500}h2[data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r]{font-family:var(--font-sans);font-size:1.25rem;font-weight:700;color:var(--ink);margin-top:2.5rem;margin-bottom:.75rem;letter-spacing:-.015em}p[data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r]{font-family:var(--font-sans);font-size:1rem;line-height:1.7;color:var(--ink-soft);margin:0 0 1rem}a[data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r]{color:var(--accent);text-decoration:none}a[data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r]:hover{text-decoration:underline}.about-cta[data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r]{display:flex;gap:1rem;margin-top:3rem;flex-wrap:wrap}.arrow[data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r]{margin-left:.35rem;transition:transform .2s ease}.btn[data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r]:hover .arrow[data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r]{transform:translate(3px)}@media (max-width: 640px){.about-cta[data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r]{flex-direction:column}.btn[data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r]{width:100%}}
</style><script type="module" src="/assets/hoisted.3WjCi9KP.js"></script></head> <body> <header class="navbar" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl> <div class="container navbar-container" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl> <a href="/" class="logo" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl> <span class="logo-dot" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl></span><span class="logo-text" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl>node-opcua</span> </a> <button class="menu-trigger" aria-label="Open menu" aria-expanded="false" type="button" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl> <span class="hamburger-bar" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl></span> <span class="hamburger-bar" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl></span> <span class="hamburger-bar" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl></span> </button> <div class="backdrop" aria-hidden="true" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl></div> <nav class="nav-drawer" aria-label="Main navigation" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl> <a href="/getting-started.html" class="nav-link" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl>Getting started</a> <a href="/api_doc/latest/" class="nav-link" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl>API reference</a> <a href="/projects.html" class="nav-link" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl>Projects</a> <a href="/news.html" class="nav-link" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl>News</a> <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-opcua/v/2.175.2" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="version-badge" aria-label="Latest release: v2.175.2" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl> <span class="version-number" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl>v2.175.2</span> <span class="version-label" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl>latest</span> </a> <a href="https://github.com/node-opcua/node-opcua" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="nav-link" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl>GitHub</a> <a href="https://github.com/sponsors/node-opcua" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="nav-link" data-astro-cid-ymhdp2rl>Sponsor</a> </nav> </div> </header>   <main>  <section class="about-content" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r> <h1 data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>The story behind node-opcua</h1> <div class="origin-block" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r> <p class="lede" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>
node-opcua started in 2014 inside a nuclear engineering facility.
        Twelve years later it's used in production at Mercedes-Benz, Renault,
        Siemens, and hundreds of industrial deployments worldwide.
</p> </div> <h2 data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>How it started</h2> <p data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>
Etienne Rossignon was working at Areva, immersed in CAD/CAM, metrology,
      and machine-to-machine communication, when he encountered OPC UA — an
      emerging standard for secure, cross-platform industrial data exchange.
      Faced with a critical project and the need to master the spec fast, he
      decided to build a full SDK from scratch in JavaScript.
</p> <p data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>
The choice of JavaScript was deliberate: Node.js's asynchronous event
      loop is a natural fit for OPC UA's subscription-and-notification model —
      many concurrent sessions per process, no thread management. At the time,
      industrial software was dominated by C/C++ and Java. Etienne bet that
      the developer velocity and ecosystem of Node.js would make OPC UA
      accessible to a far wider audience.
</p> <p data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>
He published the first commit on GitHub in 2014. The project was
      MIT-licensed from day one.
</p> <h2 data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>How it grew</h2> <p data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>
Downloads have grown more than 20× since 2020, from a few thousand a
      month to over 500,000. The stack has been in continuous development for
      twelve years — over 3,000 tests, roughly 97% code coverage, and
      production deployments on every major operating system.
</p> <p data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>
node-opcua became the OPC UA implementation embedded in
<a href="https://nodered.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>Node-RED</a>,
      the low-code programming tool from the OpenJS Foundation.
      It's used inside
<a href="https://aws.amazon.com/greengrass/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>AWS IoT Greengrass</a>,
      and has been adopted by companies and universities including
      Siemens, Valmet, Capgemini, Litmus, Tulip, BrainCube, MIT, and
      the Technical University of Munich.
</p> <h2 data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>Sterfive — the company behind the stack</h2> <p data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>
In 2017 Etienne founded
<a href="https://www.sterfive.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>Sterfive</a>,
      a French company dedicated to sustaining node-opcua and providing
      commercial services around it: support contracts, consulting, custom
      OPC UA development, and a family of commercial add-on modules (GDS,
      PubSub, Modeler, OPC UA for Node-RED, and more).
</p> <p data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>
Sterfive exclusively funds its open-source R&D through its customers.
      The technology evolves directly with industry needs — no VC, no ads,
      no telemetry. The company is a Corporate Member of the
<a href="https://opcfoundation.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>OPC Foundation</a>
and a
<a href="https://umati.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>UMATI</a> partner.
</p> <h2 data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>Open-source DNA</h2> <p data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>
Sterfive's open-source commitment extends beyond maintaining node-opcua.
      As part of its contracted engagements, the company regularly contributes
      production-grade code to third-party open-source projects in the
      industrial IoT ecosystem — including
<a href="https://github.com/eclipse-thingweb/node-wot" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>Eclipse node-wot</a>
and upstream dependencies it relies on. When a client project uncovers
      a bug in an external library, Sterfive fixes it at the source and
      pushes the contribution upstream.
</p> <h2 data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>License</h2> <p data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>
The core node-opcua SDK is released under the
<a href="https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>MIT license</a>.
      Commercial modules with extended functionality are available through
<a href="https://www.sterfive.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>Sterfive</a>.
</p> <div class="about-cta" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r> <a href="/commercial-use.html" class="btn btn-secondary" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>
Commercial use & support <span class="arrow" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>&rarr;</span> </a> <a href="https://github.com/node-opcua/node-opcua" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="btn btn-tertiary" data-astro-cid-kh7btl4r>
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