At the beginning of the year we unveiled here in the blog the news about the purchase of Nginx by F5 for the amount of $ 670 million. This company made the purchase of the project originally started by Igor Sysoev and Maksim Konovalov in order to combine DevOps and NetOps services and provide support to the field of cloud computing.
Now, a few days ago it was unveiled the news that Russian police raided the facilities of Nginx Inc. in Moscow. According to information shared by Forbes Russia, this happened after Rambler, a Russian search engine giant, claimed ownership of the Nginx web server source code.
As Rambler's arguments is that "thinks the creator of Nginx was working for him at the time he wrote the web server source code", so the authorship falls on him, according to your interpretation of Russian law.
So the police have already joined the dispute, launching a criminal investigation and searching Nginx's Moscow office.
The raid at Nginx's Moscow office was based on an alleged copyright infringement by Lynwood Investments CY Ltd, a Cyprus-based company associated with Rambler co-owner Alexander Mamut, a Russian investor.
In 2013, Mamut became a co-owner of the research giant Rambler with Vladimir Potanin and bought Potanin three years later.
News of the raid went viral when an Nginx employee posted a screenshot of the search warrant on Twitter, subsequently deleting the tweet at the request of Russian police.
The raid was confirmed by other employees. The same employee said that two NGINX employees were arrested during the raid, including the creator of NGINX, the co-founder of Nginx Inc. and current technical director Igor Sysoev, as well as his co-founder Maxim Konovalov.
Although it is rumored that they were released after being questioned.
According to the copies, Rambler claims Igor Sysoev developed Nginx while working as a system administrator for the company, and that therefore, they are the legitimate owners of the project.
“We have discovered that Rambler Internet Holding's exclusive right to the Nginx web server has been violated by actions of third parties. In this regard, Rambler Internet Holding has assigned Lynwood Investments the rights to initiate claims and lawsuits related to rights violations against Nginx, "said a Rambler spokesperson.
According to Forbes, authorities estimate that Rambler suffered losses as a result of the alleged copyright infringement at 51,4 million rubles ($ 820,000). Sysoev has never denied creating Nginx while working at Rambler.
In a 2012 interview, Sysoev claimed that he developed Nginx in his spare time and that Rambler didn't even know about it for years. He said the server was first deployed on the rate.ee and zvuki.ru websites and Rambler started using it only after a colleague asked him about it.
A spokesperson for Nginx Inc. confirmed the raid, but did not add further information on the matter, saying the company is still compiling the facts.
On the other hand, a Rambler spokesperson was also unable to comment on the case, citing poor knowledge. However, Rambler is said to have provided statements to local media Kommersant and The Bell, confirming that they filed a complaint against Nginx Inc. on December 4. However, some have disapproved of the actions of the Russian police.
Leonid Volkov, Chief of Staff of the presidential candidate Alexei Navalny, criticized the raid and the demand, saying that after 15 years the statute of limitations has expired to file a copyright infringement complaint.
Finally just It is time to wait for the resolution of said claim And especially if proceeding, this would be a problem since it would be laying the foundations for future claims in Russia to developers who worked for X company, instruction, project, etc. Where simply after many years to see the success of the project that you developed separately, come and say with permission this belongs to me.
that is, as we always have the glorious Apache,