The NGINX open source project that started in Russia announced the ban on Russia, I wonder what the father of NGINX thinks?

Written by | Yanshan and Tina

Recently, Fran ois Locoh-Donou, CEO of F5 Networks, issued an open letter saying that it has suspended all sales activities in Russia and transferred customer support related work to other locations. At the same time, Russia's access to the F5 network was removed and Russian contributions to the NGINX open source project were stopped. Neither commercial nor open source code will be placed in Russia.

After the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, F5 is not the only technology company that has taken a stand with practical actions, nor will it be the last. It is worth mentioning that although NGINX originated in Russia and its author is also a Russian, on March 11, 2019, NGINX Inc, the business entity behind NGINX, was acquired by F5 for $670 million. F5 is an American company specializing in application-layer services and application delivery networks, headquartered in Seattle, Washington. In addition, Igor Sysoev, the founder of NGINX, announced his departure in January this year.

History of NGINX

NGINX is a lightweight web server / reverse proxy server and email (IMAP/POP3) proxy server, issued under the BSD-like protocol.

Around 2000, Igor Sysoev, a 42-year-old Russian system administrator, started the project. In October 2002, Sysoev released the first public shortcode, and the project was officially open sourced in 2004. He was working for Rambler, a fast-growing Russian portal. Originally, NGINX was developed to solve the C10k problem and meet the needs of several websites, including the Rambler search engine and portal, which served 500 million requests per day.

In 2009, he founded NGINX Inc. (this is a U.S.-registered company) that provides proximity tools and support services for NGINX deployments. NGINX is headquartered in San Francisco, but has offices around the world, including Moscow. The source code for the NGINX server is still free and managed through an open source model, but a large part of the project's main contributors are NGINX employees who control the project.

In 2011, Sysoev quit his job at Rambler to work full-time as CTO of the new company, pitching an enhanced version of NGINX to enterprise users. Sysoev never denied creating NGINX during Rambler's time. In a 2012 interview, Sysoev claimed he developed NGINX in his spare time, and Rambler didn't even realize it for years.

In June 2018, Nginx Inc. Raised $43 million in Series C funding in a round led by Goldman Sachs to "accelerate application modernization and digital transformation for the enterprise."

In March 2019, NGINX was acquired by F5 for $670 million.

Today, NGINX has become the world's most popular web server. According to W3Techs, as of March 2022, NGINX accounted for 33.1% of the global web server market. In second place is Apache with a share of 31.2%.

The father of NGINX leaves

On January 18 this year, Rob Whiteley, vice president and general manager of NGINX, posted a farewell letter on his official website, officially announcing Igor Sysoev's withdrawal from NGINX and F5. This matter quickly caused a hot discussion in the circle, and many developers expressed their respect and gratitude for Igor's contributions.

After all, the success of Igor and NGINX has really inspired a lot of open source people. Igor, who shared a balance between open source and commercial products in interviews earlier, said that he did not want to create a separate commercial product, but wanted to commercially extend NGINX's main open source products, and the new features that the community wanted would appear in it. Commercial scaling is more about helping to handle thousands of instances, adding scaling performance monitoring, hosting, cloud, and CDN infrastructure add-on capabilities, and more.

Many customers would say they would be willing to pay Igor to add the new features they needed, and Igor and others would collect such requests and compare them to the requirements they received from the user community and look for intersections —"If we realized that everyone needed certain features, not just certain companies, we would include those features in the open source version." We learned what we could sell without annoying proponents of open source products or damaging the credibility of the entire project. ”

In 2011, the idea of adding new features to commercial versions in the form of proprietary modules was a pioneer. But today, many open source rising stars can already stand on the shoulders of giants and enjoy this business model.

Perhaps, as Rob Whiteley puts it, the balance between [open source and commercial] is often difficult to grasp. Igor is highly praised by developers, enterprise customers, and NGINX engineers because of his humble heart, passion for constant exploration, and will to climb to the top of his development efforts.

Twenty years later, the code Igor wrote is already powering most of the world's websites. In addition to direct use, it is also used as the underlying software for popular servers such as Cloudflare, OpenResty, and Tengine. Although Igor has left his job, his spirit and the culture he has shaped along the way will not disappear.

The involvement of the open source community

For the open source community involved in the war, the industry controversy is constant. In addition to the NGINX statement, in response to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the official websites of Node.js, React, PyTorch and other official websites stated support for Ukraine, and then some individual developers carried out supply chain "poisoning" in the name of anti-war.

As the world's largest open source source hosting service platform, GitHub is also difficult to stay out of the matter, although the official recently said that it is committed to maintaining the integrity of the platform and the company, will ensure that developers around the world can use free open source services, including developers in Russia. At the same time, however, GitHub's legal team conducts a thorough review of the regulations and complies with export control and trade regulations.

Because of the war, members of the open source community were either "active" or "forced" to take sides. But as we have asked before, if the open source code is inevitably involved and begins to "take sides", how should developers deal with themselves?