Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks • Hacker News Board

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#91

Post by user5994461 » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

s_kilk wrote: post #29

clinta wrote: post #9

I'm nervous about what this means for the future of nginx's built in load balancing. That's been an important and rock-solid part of my infrastructure.

Throwing out a question to the room: if the worst happens and Nginx gets butchered, would it be so bad to go back to using Apache? I've never used it really, everything I've done has been Nginx, but is there some technical reason why Apache wouldn't be a fine fallback option for an open-source server?

HaProxy does load balancing better, it never was a primary feature of nginx. Varnish can do the caching. Apache/Lighttpd can serve files and CGI, but maybe not as efficiently.

Apache is really struggling on resource consumption. It's still living in the world of one process or one thread per connection.

Operationally it always ends up in a clusterfuck of rewrite rules and there are many gotchas with undocumented and misbehaving directives.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#92

Post by jldugger » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

hannasanarion wrote: post #36

In the event that F5 pulls an Oracle and horribly mismanages nginx, runs it into the ground, or tries to close it off, I vote we name the community fork "nginy".

Or perhaps a more us-vs-them fork, maybe something like 'ngin-us' (pronounced 'ingenious')

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#93

Post by yingw787 » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

admax88q wrote: post #60

yingw787 wrote: post #50

So...what is the future of enterprise open source? Is there a future for enterprise open source? If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. If you mix in proprietary licenses to protect yourself, AWS forks your core, adds in open-source licensed clients, then runs you into the ground (and you lose open-source contributors/supporters as…

You could AGPL and sell proprietary exceptions. Amazon won't touch AGPL code.

Maybe. At least our company won't touch GPL code; as one colleague described to me, if you violate a proprietary license, a company will come after you for money, while violating a GPL license gets the EFF involved who will come after you for your source code.

I'm still wary, though. I could imagine if the resultant fines or source code releases from violating a GPL license weren't a strong enough deterrent, you could win by using a GPL-licensed product enough, then parry off attacks from EFF/FSF until you do a complete rewrite of the product underneath, then pay the fine/contribution to EFF/FSF while toppling the original company. If the company is big enough, and can afford enough good lawyers, there may be legal ways to get around laws.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7572332

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#94

Post by Zircom » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:43 PM UTC

bouncycastle wrote: post #85

First time I heard of this company. Their website is in the highest order of marketing speak, but actually offering nothing much. Note to self: security services are a nice way to milk governments & corporations. In any case, I'm glad that Nginx is still available for free and the project will continue to have funding in the future from what looks like a cashed-up company. Besides, if it doesn't work out, it can alwa…

We use their VPN client at where I work...it's a mess. Disconnects all the time, IF you can even get it to connect in the first place, it like's to sit there for up to 20 minutes sometimes before it finally connects. Almost never works with captive portals, and all sorts of syncing issues with our network drives.

To be fair, it might just have to do with our company's implementation, our IT department pretty hit or miss when it comes to implementing new stuff, it only rolled our 6 months ago and we do have 30,000+ employees/contractors so I'd imagine it's headache getting everything just right, but still.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#95

Post by westoque » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:43 PM UTC

yingw787 wrote: post #50

So...what is the future of enterprise open source? Is there a future for enterprise open source? If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. If you mix in proprietary licenses to protect yourself, AWS forks your core, adds in open-source licensed clients, then runs you into the ground (and you lose open-source contributors/supporters as…

I think Hashicorp[0] has nailed down the open source enterprise model perfectly.

Where they make open source software for enterprise and provide services to support.

[0]: https://www.hashicorp.com

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#96

Post by gonzo » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:45 PM UTC

gbuk2013 wrote: post #12

X-Istence wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big F5 rig is basically Linux with a CLI/admin interface on top.

(I work for F5.) This is not true - Linux is really just userspace to run our own data-plane code.

And that userspace is based on a really old version of FreeBSD.

Or maybe that’s Citrix.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#97

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:46 PM UTC

EvangelicalPig wrote: post #78

darksoul wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the public statements, F5 is committing to maintain the current level of resources NGINX has allocated to their open source programs, to keep the same dev team involved, to keep licensing as it currently is, not change any of the repositories on Mercurial and GitHub and to keep the NGINX brand. Which only means that NGINX will get even better over time.

Hopefully if it declines we can have a MariaDB type fork take it's place.

[deleted]

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#98

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

yingw787 wrote: post #93

admax88q wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could AGPL and sell proprietary exceptions. Amazon won't touch AGPL code.

Maybe. At least our company won't touch GPL code; as one colleague described to me, if you violate a proprietary license, a company will come after you for money, while violating a GPL license gets the EFF involved who will come after you for your source code. I'm still wary, though. I could imagine if the resultant fines or source code releases from violating a GPL license weren't a strong enough deterrent, you coul…

The only claimants to your source code are those to whom you've distributed binaries built from GPL sources. Anyone else can pound sand.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#99

Post by user5994461 » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

westoque wrote: post #95

yingw787 wrote: post #50

So...what is the future of enterprise open source? Is there a future for enterprise open source? If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. If you mix in proprietary licenses to protect yourself, AWS forks your core, adds in open-source licensed clients, then runs you into the ground (and you lose open-source contributors/supporters as…

I think Hashicorp[0] has nailed down the open source enterprise model perfectly. Where they make open source software for enterprise and provide services to support. [0]: https://www.hashicorp.com

They barely have any revenue and they're struggling.

It's probably one of the next companies to be acquired in the coming years.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#100

Post by coder543 » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

omnimus wrote: post #77

PaulBGD_ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason I switched to nginx from apache years ago was due to configuration, which was much nicer from my side. If I was to switch away from nginx because something happened, I'd probably find something similar configuration and speed wise. Caddy looks nice.

https://caddyserver.com/products/licenses i would end up paying twice as much for caddy as i do for server

You can use caddy commercially for free, the same as nginx. You just have to use a copy built from source by someone other than Light Code Labs, because the prebuilt binaries downloaded from the official caddy site are the only ones with the commercial licensing restriction.

I think caddy and nginx are both great pieces of software that have overly expensive commercial pricing.