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Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

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Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you were the author of a GPL piece of code whose licence was violated, and the EFF came to you and said "we'll pay for the lawyers and in exchange we get publicity", most people would say yes.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#112

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…

> If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS

It seems not obvious to everyone, but you don't have to use a license, that allows AWS to run you into the ground. Take a look at API Copyleft License: https://github.com/kemitchell/api-copyleft-license

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#113
post #77

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

I had the same impression, but mholt pointed out to me that building from source or using the Github binary releases are valid alternatives to paying for licensing.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#114

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

I love Hashicorp products, however, all of their pricing behind "Contact Sales" is a major turn off.

Why?

I don't want to be the subject of a constant dripping of emails, calls, and missings from a sales person who is constant to get their numbers and puts me in their sales automation pipeline.

Give me a ballpark estimate, I can go to whomever is needed, and we can go from there: I've never ran into a case where "I don't know" how much this costs is an appropriate answer to give a manager.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HashiCorp is doing VERY well revenue-wise. They are not struggling. Where did you hear they are struggling?

(I have no affiliation with HashiCorp.)

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#116
post #66
post #49

I guess that signals it's time for nginx users to check out possible alternatives - just in case, if things turn out for the worse. I can recommend having a look at https://varnish-cache.org/ - while its performance might not be 100% up to par with nginx in some (very, very high-end) scenarios, it has many other fortes that nginx (at least in its FOSS release version; I've never used nginx plus) just cannot match in…

Curious, why not envoy ( https://www.envoyproxy.io/ )? Its open-source, used/supported by variety of companies, has more features than NGINX.

Envoy doesn't support static file serving: https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/378

I'm sure that's not the only feature it's missing compared to nginx. Envoy is not very comparable to nginx, in my opinion... but I also wouldn't reach for varnish as an nginx alternative either.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#117
post #5

With everything that is going on with open source licensing this certainly can create a bit of worry down the line. Interesting to also see what aws is doing in response to some of the more complicated licensing agreements and specifically elastic search: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-... The challenge for nginx was they raised VC capital so they were in a forcing function. Either grow r…

>With everything that is going on with open source licensing

What exactly is going on with open source licencing? Is anybody violating open source licences?

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#118

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".

Got to feel lucky Oracle or IBM didn't buy them, definitely would have run them into the ground.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#119
post #90

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…

What happened is the realisation that FOSS developers also have to pay their bills and idealism only takes so far. So anyone that refuses to pay for their tools will eventually either loose them, or contend to be happy to use lesser ones.

What is interesting is that we are seeing people in other industries shamed for hiring people in unpaid or underpaid jobs and even people shamed for taking those jobs. I wonder if that is something that will ever happen in the software industry.

Open source software is clearly a net positive overall. However is it a net negative for the industry when enterprise developers rely on open source software without demanding their company provides financial support for that software? How is that different than the company relying on free labor from something like unpaid internships?

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#120
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It's still living in the world of one process or one thread per connection

Not exactly - you choose the event MPM (mod_http2 won't even run with prefork MPM).

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