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Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

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Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#201

Post by vetrom »

tyingq wrote: post #160
ryanmarsh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incredibly deft on F5's part. What are the alternatives to F5's products? Cloud products, and home rolled Nginx configs.

I imagine haproxy might get more popular if F5 does anything to hobble the open source part of nginx.

haproxy is amazingly functional and has done a fine job of evolving over the years. At a particular $DEFUNCTCLOUDVENDOR we implemented a haproxy based ELB-ish solution with home grown control logic to replace a F5 installation whos configuration size grew unwieldy (the F5 config parser was falling over in their LBs) while we were nowhere near the F5's touted connection/throughput numbers. F5 wasn't really willing to work with us on licensing, so we implemented a system based on haproxy VMs that worked because we were more than a bit overprovisioned on switching capacity and were able to shard that configuration base more effectively over more VMs.

This was 2011, so I'd hope newer F5 gear has gotten past that.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#203

Post by shereadsthenews »

mlindner wrote: post #184
StudentStuff wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought F5 was primarily a Seattle based company? I've known more F5 employees growing up in Seattle than Amazon employees at least. On another note, F5's poorly written code is the reason TLS 1.0 is considered insecure (using a variant of the POODLE attack), among other major security lapses.

F5 has a few hundred person office in San Jose as well as a decent amount in Tel Aviv as well.

Sure but it's not engineers who are getting paid in this deal, it's VCs and lawyers.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#204

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

tshaddox wrote: post #202
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agpl will not save you if they choose to re-implement the solution.

Nor will anything else, I reckon.

keeping the system proprietary will make it harder for them to understand what you are doing; but that will also be very limiting move - in the enterprise software space.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#205

Post by ummonk »

c0l0 wrote: 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…

Given how widely used nginx is, wouldn’t a community maintained fork be the most likely outcome of things changing for the worse?

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#206

Post by maheart »

coder543 wrote: post #110
wolco wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life is nicer in many ways under apache.

What are some of these "many ways"? because I strongly favor the quality of life under nginx over that of apache. For smaller projects, these days I reach for Caddy which is even more pleasant to use than nginx.

Not OP, but here are some (IMO big) advantages Apache has over nginx (FOSS):

- Provides HTTP caching (via mod_cache)

- Simplifies the deployment stack by providing built-in interpreters for dynamic languages. e.g. mod_php (i.e. you don't need php-fpm), mod_wsgi (i.e. you don't need gunicorn)

- Load-balancer upstream affinity ("stickiness") based on HTTP cookies

- Load-balancing based on upstream's connection count (via mod_heartbeat)

- Built-in Let's Encrypt integration (via mod_md)

tl;dr provides a lot of features out of the box -- some people may see this as "bloat" or overly tight coupling, but this provides simplicity.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#207

Post by sneak »

sjwright wrote: post #198
sneak wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has the AGPL ever successfully held up in court?

Surely it doesn't need to—either you accept the license or you don't accept the license. If you don't accept the license, you can't use the software. I'd imagine that the challenge with the AGPL is catching and suing the non-compliant services.

If the source is available, I absolutely can use the software—regardless of license. The only thing preventing me from doing so would be either criminal or civil law, and while IANAL, I don’t believe there are criminal penalties for license violations. The copyright holder would have to sue me, and prove that I violated the license, and then they might be able to get a court to force me to stop, pay them, or both.

I am curious whether there are any practical observations, one way or the other, about the AGPL’s enforceability.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#209

Post by shereadsthenews »

wskinner wrote: post #65
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…

My understanding is that Google has recently deviated from this strategy. The result of the strategy you mention is that the industry standardized on other companies' implementation of ideas that came from Google: Hadoop (MapReduce), HDFS (GFS), ZooKeeper (Chubby, and more. For examples of newer open source projects that see more active maintenance from Google, see Kubernetes and TensorFlow.

But K8s is not a development of Google software. It is developed specifically for the public, it throws out all of the interesting parts of Borg, and Google themselves don't use it, or barely do. As for that other stuff it seems to have worked out fine for Google: they describe obsolete technologies and the outside world develops hideous analogs of those and uses them for decades. Hadoop for example is just an unbelievably bad implementation of map reduce as it was ten years ago and is laughable compared to what Google replaced it with. HDFS is a joke of GFS which Google turned off eight years back. It's really remarkable the way the industry is essentially self-disabling in this regard. Meanwhile Google does not burden itself with trying to adopt every idea they read in a paper, and maintain a significant cost and efficiency advantage by doing so.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#210

Post by laura2013 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #88

Well it makes sense for F5. Their main buisness, hardware loadbalancing is rapidly diminishing, so buying in NGINX seems like a sensible move. After all, its much easier to sell support to people who are actually _using_ your product.

hey, can you provide a source for their decrease in market share? Or are you assuming based on AWS growth? I tried looking up the Gartner starts but couldn't get past a login.
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