ZDNet reported on the 12th, original article “Russian police raid NGINX Moscow office”.
Russian police today raided the Moscow office of NGINX Inc., the company behind one of the internet’s most popular web server technologies. Police seized equipment and detained employees for questioning.
Rambler Group, the former employer of Nginx creator Igor Sysoev, has filed an infringement lawsuit against Nginx, arguing that Nginx is a program Sysoev developed during his time at Rambler, and that all Nginx copyright should belong to Rambler Group.
Sysoev created NGINX in the early 2000s and open-sourced the NGINX code in 2004.
In 2009 he founded the US company NGINX, Inc. to provide tools and support services for NGINX. The company is headquartered in San Francisco but has offices around the world, including Moscow. The NGINX server source code remains free and is managed under an open-source model, although a large share of the project’s main contributors are NGINX employees.
Sysoev never denied creating NGINX during his time at Rambler. In a 2012 interview, Sysoev claimed he developed NGINX in his spare time, and that Rambler didn’t even realize it for years. He said the server was first deployed on the Rate.ee and zvuki.ru sites, and Rambler only started using it after colleagues asked about it.
In February 2019, NGINX finally overtook Apache HTTPD to become the most widely deployed server on the internet. According to Netcraft’s December 2019 web server survey, NGINX held a 38% market share.
A month later, in March 2019, network security and networking equipment vendor F5 Networks acquired NGINX, Inc. for $670 million.
NGINX Employees Report Sysoev Arrested
When an NGINX employee posted a screenshot of the search warrant on Twitter, news of the raid spread everywhere. He later deleted the tweet at the request of Russian police. The raid was confirmed by other employees.
