Nginx Founder Detained, Former Company Complains About Infringement of Nginx Developed During His Tenure

Igor Sysoev, the founder of Nginx, the most popular open source server software with a global market share of nearly 38%, has been detained by Russian authorities. The reason is that his former employer complained that Nginx was created during his tenure and therefore infringed copyright. The Russian authorities have now filed a case.

On December 12, Nginx's Moscow office was seized by Russian police.RaidPolice seized its equipment and detained several Nginx employees for questioning, including Igor Sysoev, founder and CTO of Nginx, and co-founder Maxim Konovalov.

It is reported that the incident occurred last week. Rambler GroupRambler filed a copyright infringement complaint against NGINX Inc., claiming full ownership of the Internet’s most popular web server technology. According to a copy of the search warrant posted on Twitter, Rambler said Nginx founderIgor SysoevI developed Nginx while working as a system administrator for Rambler, Inc., so they (Rambler) are the legal owners of the project.

Igor Sysoev: The man who built Nginx

Igor Sysoev was born in 1970 and grew up in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

He graduated from Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU) in 1994. BMSTU is ranked first among Russian polytechnic universities and is located in Moscow. After graduation, Igor Sysoev stayed in Moscow.

He started using computers and learning programming in 1988 (at the age of 18). In 1992, he sold an antivirus program he had written in assembly language.

In November 2000, he started working at Rambler&Co in Moscow as a system administrator.

In 2002, he used his spare time to adjust the patch to optimize Apache's feedback. But after careful consideration,He decided to write it from scratch., because “it’s easier to do that than to adapt to what’s already there.”

then,Nginx, written in C, was born.

At first, Nginx documentation was only available in Russian, and it was not well-known, so there were only a few users of Nginx, and all of them were Russian websites, but Igor Sysoev still insisted on developing and maintaining it. To this day,Nginx has become the most widely used server software.

From his personal website:http://sysoev.ru/, recording the entire process of his development of Nginx since 2002.

Rambler and Nginx, both are not simple 

Some people may not know who Rambler is, and what caused the dispute between it and Nginx?

Rambler Group is the parent company of rambler.ru, and rambler.ru is one of the largest search engines and Internet portals in RussiaRambler provides services including web search, email, news aggregation, e-commerce and other services to the global Russian-speaking community.

Nginx is a high-performance HTTP and reverse proxy web server, and also provides IMAP/POP3/SMTP services. It was developed by Igor Sysoev for the second most visited site in Russia, Rambler.ru (Russian: Рамблер).

In the early 2000s, Igor Sysoev was working as a system administrator at Rambler. In his spare time, he wrote the original NGINX web server code, which he eventually launched. Released as open source in 2004.

Later, Igor Sysoev left Rambler in 2011 and co-founded the company NGINX. In March 2019, NGINX was acquired by F5 Networks, a leading global application delivery network (ADN) company, for $670 million.

According to a survey conducted by UK Netcraft in December 2019,Nginx is the most widely used web server technology, surpassing major alternatives like the Apache Foundation, Microsoft, and Google.

now,More than 30% of the websites on the Internet, including very popular sites like Netflix, run on NGINX server software.

If the current trend continues,Nginx is expected to replace Apache by the end of 2020, which would make it the largest supplier of Web-oriented computers.

A project developed by an amateur 15 years ago is now being complained of infringement

After understanding Rambler and Nginx, we can understand the reason for this complaint.

Since the project was created by Igor Sysoev when he was working at Rambler, it took 15 years for Rambler to become aware of it and file an infringement complaint.

But before that,Igor Sysoev never denied that he was creating Nginx during his work In a 2012 interview, he said he developed Nginx in his spare time, and he also said that the server was initially deployed on the Rate.ee and zvuki.ru websites, and that Rambler started using it only after a colleague asked him about it.

According to Russian media reports,Rambler said Igor Sysoev worked on the project during his working hours and illegally distributed the project, causing Rambler to lose 51.4 million rubles (about 5.7451 million yuan).“NGINX is a formal work, developed in the framework of labor relations with Rambler in the early 2000s by Igor Sysoev,” Rambler told a Russian media outlet. “Therefore, any use of the program without the consent of the Rambler Group is a violation of proprietary rights.”

and Igor Ashmanov, former executive director of Rambler, said he was ready to testify in court in support of Igor Sysoev, he commented under the statement released by Rambler: "Igor Sysoev is a system administrator, software development is not his job responsibility."

The case has now been filed under Article 146, Part 3 (Infringement of copyright and related rights) of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.

A spokesperson for F5 Networks confirmed the arrests, but said they were still gathering the facts and had no further comment. A spokesperson for Rambler Group told ZDNet that they were not proficient in English and could not comment.

It is reported that Igor Sysoev and co-founder Maxim Konovalov have been released after being questioned by the police, but their mobile phones have been confiscated.

It is surprising that Igor Sysoev, the technical master who created Nginx, is now being sued for his most notable achievement. What do you think about this?

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