The core developer of Nginx, currently the world's most popular web server, has left the project, saying he no longer considers it a “free, open source project in the public interest.” From the report: His fork, freenginx, “will be run by developers rather than corporate entities,” Maxim Dunin wrote, “freeing it from the arbitrary actions of corporations.” Dounin was one of the earliest and still most active programmers on the open source Nginx project, and is a member of the company he founded in 2011 to commercially support the steadily growing web server. He is one of the first employees of Nginx, Inc. Nginx is now used by about a third of the world's web servers, surpassing Apache.
Nginx Inc. was acquired by Seattle-based networking company F5 in 2019. Later that year, two of Nginx's leaders, Maxim Konovalov and Igor Sisoev, were detained and interrogated in their homes by armed Russian state agents. Sysoev's former employer, the internet company Rambler, claims that the Nginx source code was developed during Sysoev's time at Rambler (where Dounin also worked), and that the company owns the rights to the source code. claimed to own it. Although criminal charges and rights do not appear to have materialized, the impact of the Russian company's intrusion into popular open source parts of the web's infrastructure has caused some alarm. Sysoev left F5 and the Nginx project in early 2022. Later that year, F5 ceased all operations in Russia due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Some of his Nginx developers who are still in Russia have founded his Angie, which is primarily developed to support his Nginx users in Russia. Dounin also technically stopped working at F5 at that point, but maintained his role at Nginx “as a volunteer,” according to a post on his mailing list.
Dounin said in a statement that F5's “new non-technical management team” “recently decided they knew how to run an open source project. In particular, they “We have decided to interfere with the security policy we have used for many years and have decided to ignore both that policy and the developer.” 'Position. Dounin wrote that while this was “very understandable” given the ownership, it meant he “lost control over the changes made to nginx” and so he resigned and forked it. ing.
