offices of Nginx—the company behind the world’s second most popular
web server software—over a copyright infringement complaint filed
by Rambler, a Russian Internet portal, and email service provider.
According to multiple[1] reports[2] from local media and
social media, the police conducted searches and has also detained
several employees of the company, including Igor Sysoev, the
original developer of Nginx and Maxim Konovalov, another
co-founder of the company.
Over 30% of the websites on the Internet today, including many
of the world’s most popular sites like Netflix, run on the Nginx
server.
Igor Sysoev created the Nginx web server in the early 2000s and
open-sourced it in 2004, after which he founded the company Nginx
in 2015 that has now been acquired by F5
Networks[3], an American technology
company, for $ 670 million.
According to a copy of the complaint shared on Twitter, Rambler
accused that Sysoev created the software while he was working as a
system administrator for the company. Thus, Rambler claims to own
the copyright of the application.
— Anton Nesterov (@AntNesterov) December
12, 2019[4]
Rambler also claimed that Sysoev worked on the project during
his working hours, and then later, he illegally distributed the
program, causing Rambler to estimate the damage of 51.4 million
rubles.
“Nginx is an official work, the development of which since the
beginning of the 2000s in the framework of labor relations with
Rambler, was carried out by Igor Sysoev,” Rambler told[5] a Russian media site.
“Therefore, any use of this program without the consent of the
Rambler Group is a violation of the exclusive right.”
Sysoev confirmed that he indeed worked at Rumbler during the years
when he started working on the project, but he created the Nginx program in
his free time[6].
“It should be noted that programming was not part of my job
responsibilities, but since there were time and traction, the first
thing I did was adapt the patch to compress Apache responses,”
Sysoev said in that interview.
“Then, I was asked to deal with the mod_proxy module. I looked at
it and decided it was easier to write everything from scratch than
to adapt to some things there.”
Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (violation of copyright and
related rights).
Meanwhile, Nginx has not yet responded to The Hacker News emails
or released any public statements on the situation.
This is a developing story. We will update this story when more
information becomes available.
References
- ^
multiple (t.me) - ^
reports
(thebell.io) - ^
acquired by F5 Networks
(thehackernews.com) - ^
December 12, 2019
(twitter.com) - ^
told (vc.ru) - ^
Nginx program in his free time
(habr.com)
Read more http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackersNews/~3/gQvjQSweDxs/nginx-copyright-rumbler.html